China; Heaven of Pirated Products

China makes up about 70% of the World’s pirated products, hence becoming a heaven for pirated product traders.

The country that has revolutionized the production industry around the world, and has attracted billions of dollars of investment from the economic giants has shocked the world throughout the last decade by not taking adequate steps to eliminate knock-off products and pirated media.

According to statistics of 2003, counterfeited products produced in China were estimated to be somewhere between 19 to 24 billion dollars. According to a leading newspaper, the majority of the buyers are foreigners. In many cases some provinces are specialized in counterfeiting one line of products such as Wengang for pens; Taizhou for auto parts; Chaozhou for cosmetics. But even more alarming is that the quality of counterfeiting is improving day by day and has now reached a point where even marketing professionals can be deceived. According to a report, 95% of CDs in China are pirated and according to another report of 2007, 93% of DVDs are pirated.

In 2010, the shopping malls in China were hit with fake versions of the IPhone 4 even before the real IPhone4 was released! Even more astounding was that the fake one had some features which were not even included in the original one. The vendor who was selling the fake IPhone challenged the correspondent of the Washington post as saying,

“You can’t tell the difference between this and the real thing”.

Although the market of pirated products has created thousands of jobs and pays billions of dollars, it is affecting the global market as a whole. The businesses of elite companies are also suffering a great deal from rip off products, as they are already injected into the market even before the original products hit the shelves.