Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Saturday, Mar 11, 2006
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Saturday, Mar 11, 2006 |
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Marketing
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Piracy Industry & Economy - Economic Offences `Product duplication prevalent in every industry' L.N. Revathy
Coimbatore, March 10 Mr Zaheer Khan, Chairman and Managing Director of Enforcers of Intellectual Property Rights (EIPR), has expressed concern over the rising ratio of counterfeit products in the Indian market. NEXT TO CHINA "India is next only to China in this trade. While it is an organised trade in China, with almost 8 per cent of its population being involved in such practices, it is still illegal and punishable under the law here. Product duplication is widely prevalent in every segment of the industry," he told Business Line. EIPR is an investigation agency that specialises in anticounterfeiting solutions. The company provides specialised services like IPR investigations, grey marketing evaluations, litigations support and multi jurisdictional raid actions to help combat the growing menace of counterfeit goods and products. It has in the past three years carried out over 100 raids and seized goods worth Rs 5 crore. "Delhi and Mumbai account for a large part of the counterfeiting market," Mr Khan observed. CANON NOT ALONE Speaking of product counterfeiting, he said the Indian market was exposed to product duplication with large multinational exploring the opportunity for expanding their business. "About 4 years ago, the counterfeit and original products of Canon was almost in the same ratio. But Canon is not the only brand to be duplicated. "There are others such as Tata Motors, Lucas-TVS, Daimler Chrysler etc. Most raids have been carried out in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi and West Bengal," he said. Growing incidence of customer complaints about the product and the rising warranty claims apart from revenue and sales loss generally pushed companies to review its position. Among others, EIPR started working on behalf of Canon Inc since December 2002. FREQUENT RAIDS HELP "We conducted continuous raids on the manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and printers of counterfeit canon products from 40 per cent at start to less than 10 per cent now. We seized close to Rs 5 crore worth of counterfeit canon products mostly in the major cities and neighbouring places," Mr Khan said and added that as Canon was a leading brand, it would be tough to control the fake products totally, but frequent raids would certainly help bringing down the flow of such products. "Earlier the malpractice was centralised in northern India, but now our investigation exposes high level growth of counterfeiting business in southern India also. Our investigations reveal that huge quantities of goods are coming into India from China through the Nepal route. EIPR'S future course of action for Canon will be to track the inflow of goods in to India from China.
More Stories on : Piracy | Economic Offences
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