Stakeholders urged to help fight fake products

DEALING with counterfeit products needs collective action by all stakeholders in the country, says CHM Group operations manager Joselito Tubon.
Tubon said based on CHM’s market reports, sale of fake electronic products such as boom boxes was on the rise and detrimental for authorised dealers.
“Honestly, it is a very challenging market because of the presence of fake products,” he said.
“You can see around, even the JBL boom boxes, there are a lot of look alike JBL in the country, which the retailers are selling it as the genuine JBL product and deceiving customers.”
Tubon said even though Customs was the prime agency to do its due diligence on the fight against fake and counterfeit products, it however needed collective efforts from all stakeholders concerned.
“So it is very scary at the moment, it is just very unfortunate that the government is actually allowing all these importations of fake products, because we are seeing like for example the JBL, the small ones, we are selling it only for K98, and that is genuine and people get the quality and value,” he said.
“But if they go to certain stores, they pay maybe K70, it is fake, they say that it is water proof, but if you put it on their, rain, it is damaged.
“It will be a joint effort, Customs can do what they can do.
“Of course, it starts with Customs to identify what are fake, but I understand the difficulties, because they cannot open every shipment.
“But when it comes to display, there should be some other government agencies that move around and check if these goods are genuine or counterfeit.”
Tubon said the government and law abiding retailers needed to work together in terms of information sharing in order to address the identifying these unscrupulous businesses.
“Everyone has to play their part.”