In this article here, they have cited examples of how genuine were mistaken for being fake due to the delay in releasing the new stuff.
LG Chocolate fake phones have been released much earlier than the original. Manufacturers find it easy to manufacture a mould and use older technology to sell as brand new. Consumers are the real losers at the end of the day. It is believed that there are so many factories in China who are so good at producing counterfeit that anything you want can be produced within a couple of days and be on the market straight away.
I remember a vendor who once brought me to a market in Shenzhen tells of stories of our a just released product in Taiwan has already made its way into the Shenzhen IT market. If you try buying memory cards in China, don’t be surprised if your 256mb memory card turns out to be 128mb afterall. If anything, one must always try on the spot the product and if it didn’t match your requirement, leave the shop immediately.
Extract from the article here:
Another example is PlayStation Portable (PSP), a portable game player developed by Japan’s Sony.
There were rumours that Sony was developing an accessory for the PSP to support a handphone function. A Chinese company jumped on the bandwagon and produced a fake with such a feature. This led to new online rumours that Sony has released a PSP phone. What’s more, the fake is selling at around US$650 ($1,008), as expensive as high-end phones by Samsung Electronics or Sony Ericsson.
Korean companies in Seoul say they can do little to combat the counterfeit industry in China.
There are dozens of such businesses in China and most are very small. They hire highly skilled engineers to replicate electronic products within one or two months of the release of the originals.
Once a circuit diagram has been copied, it is handed to a manufacturer which produces 20,000 to 30,000 counterfeit units and then disappears. And the fakes turn out to be virtually as good as the originals.
Recently, Samsung Electronics was able to suss out a company producing fakes by tracking down its distribution channel.
Samsung then offered its designers jobs. But the designers turned down Samsung’s offer, saying they can make much more money producing fakes. It is not known if Samsung pressed piracy charges against the company and its workers.
