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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (3343)	7/12/2004 3:26:11 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

In China, A Growing Taste for Chic But Fakes Also Vex Developing Market By Peter S. Goodman Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A01 SHANGHAI -- Beneath the high ceilings of the Plaza 66 shopping center, a temple of consumption in China's most materialistic city, Nicole Jiang steps through the glass doors of Louis Vuitton. ... "China is the market with the fastest growth in the world," said Giovanni del Vecchio of Prada, which has 10 stores in China and plans 20 more by the end of 2005. ... Most counterfeits are sold on street corners from New York to Rome to people who know they're not real. But in recent years extremely high-quality fakes have penetrated legitimate distribution channels and landed in reputable U.S. and European shops, selling to customers who think they are buying the genuine article, according to the authorities. In a series of investigations between 2000 and this spring, Italian customs officials seized more than 200,000 watches -- most of them counterfeit Rolexes -- bound for boutiques in northern Italy, Marco Fanti, chief of the anti-fraud department at the Italian Ministry of Finance, said in a recent interview in Rome. The watches were so well made -- including the internal identifying marks stamped inside real Rolexes -- that even Rolex had trouble distinguishing them as fake, Fanti said. According to Fanti, many of the parts for these watches were manufactured in southern China and flown from Hong Kong and Malaysia to Austria, Belgium and Germany, then tucked into removable floorboards in cars and driven to the southern Italian city of Naples, center of a distribution ring overseen by a branch of the Mafia known as the Camorra. Finally, they were parceled out to artisans near Venice, who fashioned gold cases and put the pieces together. [my note: looks like Mafia knows to take advantage of Chinese cheap labor too<g>] ... Given that China remains an emerging market, some companies dismiss the prevalence of fakes in the country as a minor irritation. Serge Brunschwig, chief operating officer for Vuitton, calls it "a temporary phenomenon," one that will disappear as incomes continue to rise. "People have a desire for the real thing," he said. ... But Hong Kong is also a root source of the counterfeiting. Wealthy Hong Kong women bring their handbags over the Chinese border to the city of Shenzhen, where they hire skilled craftsman to duplicate them, contributing to a dramatic increase in the quality of Chinese-made fakes. ... washingtonpost.com