Alibaba has joined forces with Louis Vuitton and others to fight the $461 billion counterfeiting business
Less than a month after the US called out China’s largest online marketplace, Taobao, for its rampant counterfeiting, the Chinese company’s parent has formed an alliance of 20 brands to use data to fight fakes.
Alibaba announced its Big Data Anti-Counterfeiting Alliance, a partnership of 20 brands including Louis Vuitton, Samsung, Mars and Swarovski, will use anti-counterfeiting technologies that can scan up to 10 million product listings a day to remove counterfeit goods from Taobao. It had removed 380 million product listings from Taobao in the year ending last August, the company said in a statement.
Just over 63% of the world’s fake goods—including handbags, perfume, phones and even chocolate—come from China. In 2013, the value of international trade in fake goods was $461 billion, or 2.5% of global imports. The US is hit the hardest by intellectual property rights infringement, the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development reported in 2016.
In late 2016, the office of the United States Trade Representative included Taobao, Alibaba’s consumer-to-consumer market, on its annual “notorious markets” list. The list came out just as Alibaba sought to expand beyond China through actively courting foreign brands to sell through its other channels.
The Chinese e-commerce giant said the Big Data Anti-Counterfeiting Alliance will disclose its progress on a regular basis.
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