Materials News

Europeans fight product piracy

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According to a recent survey it carried out among its members, Euromap says the losses caused by product piracy have increased in the last three years, with losses totalling some EUR800 million. Also, 18% of the companies polled reckon that the losses attributable to product piracy amount to between 10-20% of sales, with a further 12% putting the figure even higher. The companies responding to the survey believe that China accounts for by far the largest output of pirated goods, followed by Turkey and India.

VDMA, meanwhile, says product piracy cost German machinery and plant manufacturers around EUR6.4 billion in 2009, some 4% of the industry's total sales. One out of every 11 illegally copied machines is a plastics or rubber machine; at the time of the 2008 survey it was only one in 20.

To help fight piracy, VDMA has set up a Product and Know-how Protection Working Group (www.protect-ing.de) and at the K2010 show had two suppliers who were working in unison with the association to showcase product protection.

One of these was Polysecure that uses markers to identify plastics products. These are added homogeneously to the plastic and ensure that every product made from it can be identified by a robust DNA at any time. The company says that the marker's homogeneous distribution in the component means that if an aircraft crashes, for example, one tiny splinter is enough to establish where the component comes from. "This is of decisive importance in terms of product liability in particular," says Polysecure.