Chinese manfacurers take imitation to the next level

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Have you ever visited China ? Until last year I had always heard stories of how people were all impressed at the range of imitation merchandise that you get to buy in China. You ask for and get imitations of a Mont Blanc, Omega, Rolex, Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Panasonic and what more its at a fraction of what the original sells. My rhetoric always was that its simple enough to weed out the imitation from the fake - is it not after all why you pay for the original. One visit to Hong Kong last year to my aunt's house was enough to make me realize that if most of us cant anyways differentiate between the original and fake - why not just go for the fake ?

Quality and durability might be question marks in your mind - but after all with the ownership duration of most products (particularly electronics) going down this also might soon cease to be a reason why people might not just buy fakes.

Nearly 30-60% of most manufacturing is done out of China which has made "Made in China" a brand in itself. So this puts them in a highly enviable position to churn out fakes. As if pirating products which existed in the market was not a big enough problem, recently I came across this article here from which it appears that they have now gone one step further (after all innovation also has a role to play!). The Chinese seem to be faking the products even before the manufacturers can introduce the originals and this makes the originals look like the fakes ! Ripping apart an existing product and imitating is one level of piracy - but getting the specs of a product before the original product is on the shelves means outright theft.

It is foolish to think that China itself feels good about this. The efforts that one gets to read about what all China seems to be doing is huge - but the effects don't seem to be seen - you need to work smarter folks! I say smarter because whatever the decision makers seem to be doing or saying they are doing the manufacturers themselves don't seem to be following !

What might be the problems of piracy for China ?

1. If anybody reading this post feels that there is a Chinese 'brand' speak out - I for one cant think beyond Huawei
2. Even if there are Chinese brands - they graduating to the next level as a credible brand is a definite no no
3. People are happy to buy a "Made in China" product of an international brand more reading than just a made in China product.
4. Chinese are one of the biggest consumers of most of the products they imitate - which means even if you imitate you might need to meet the quality standards - so is it a big benefit to imitate in the first place. After all given the size of the markets for most products in India and China any international manufacturer will anyway reduce the price and play the volume game

Would definitely love to hear some comments.