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Mr. Tran Huu Linh, General Director of the Market Surveillance Agency (L) talks about conterfeit goods |
Mr. Tran Huu Linh, General Director of the Market Surveillance Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said this at the seminar ‘Protecting brands against counterfeiting, imitation goods and intellectual property violations’ held yesterday. Moreover, he revealed that in the first 6 months of 2023, the Market Surveillance Agency paid visits to stores discovering nearly 3,000 counterfeit goods-related cases and inspectors collected nearly VND30 billion (US$ 1,271,404).
However, these scattered cases still do not fully reflect the problem of counterfeit goods on the market today. Many products of all kinds, including famous brands of the world to Vietnamese products, are counterfeited; worse, counterfeit consumer goods and replica goods are smuggled from other countries into Vietnam or produced in the country.
Impacts of counterfeiting include brands’ suffering loss of sale, damaging authentic brands’ reputations, leaving companies to deal with the fallout of counterfeits and brands being forced to spend time and money fighting fakes. FDI in multi-brand retail fretted about Vietnam’s business environment when counterfeit commodities were rampant in the market.
In the past, clothes, cosmetics, and shoes were usually faked but now law enforcement agencies also discovered sub-standard nutritional supplements in the market.
Recently, staff of the Market Surveillance Agency also discovered that expensive items such as glass cooktops from Germany and Italy are also being counterfeited in Vietnam. In the past year or so, the Market Surveillance Agency has received requests from many brands in the world or with manufacturing plants in Vietnam to investigate the status of counterfeiting and imitation of brands of the company.
For example, Ajinomoto’s MSG and Acecook’s instant noodles are consumed well in the local market. Representatives from both firms have recently complained that there are more and more fake MSG and instant noodles on the market and they expected the Market Surveillance Agency to investigate, said Mr. Tran Huu Linh.
Next, a lot of products of the brands of Procter & Gamble Group, such as cosmetics, shower gel, soap are also being counterfeited in the domestic market, said Mr. Linh. Even children's toys of a very famous brand in the world, the Danish Logo, also moaned about the infringement of intellectual property rights in the Vietnamese market.
