I recently returned from my first trip to China, where I spent some time in Shanghai. A local colleague showed me around town, including a “fake market” where vendors had stalls and were selling various things. All of them had “the real stuff” behind a hidden wall, such as designer clothes, watches, etc. All of it was dirt cheap and I’m sure are knockoffs, but I was surprised by the quality:
• One of the store owners threw a watch on the ground, stomped on it it, dragged it with his foot across the concrete. The bezel was unscratched (“see – sapphire crystal”). Another has a complex self-winding mechanism that even if not from the related brand, would require some precision manufacturing. Both are heavy with metal cases, seem pretty high-quality, and keep time just fine.
• Another item, a 1W laser pointer, seems to be the same product as one of the higher-end ones I have. It looks and functions identically, weights the same down to several grams, and works great.
So my question is: how likely is it that such items are the “real” unbranded thing, coming off the same factory production lines? Chinese firms do a lot of contract manufacturing (a manufacturer building on behalf of multiple brands). Would it be possible that these factories do undocumented production runs of the same items, just fake branded (or not at all)?
I’m just curious as it seems this would be an easy way to produce the product (albeit not legal), rather than someone trying to reverse engineer a cheaper knock-off.
Much of the components of branded “Swiss movements” are produced in China today and just assembled in Switzerland (or Germany, or wherever they are advertised as being manufactured), and I would assume the same of synthetic sapphire watch faces and numerous other components. What you are getting from an authentic branded automatic watch, aside from a certificate of authenticity and features that an expert horologist will probably be able to distinguish a genuine article from a sophisticated counterfeit, are the quality control and warranty. Of course, you can buy an inexpensive, resin-cased digital watch or a quartz-timed analog watch that will keep better time than the finest chronometer-grade ‘automatique’ and will withstand abuse that will probably kill the owner without dropping a second, so really, you are buying a luxury item to satisfy your own whims or impress other people, and buying a counterfeit copy kind of subverts the point of that, so…
By default I assume laser pointers and other inexpensive, low margin electronics come from China, South Korea, or maybe Taiwan. When a company like Apple goes to Foxconn in China to build high quality hardware for them they set up exclusive rights to proprietary information and processes, but of course the knowledge behind how to build those devices still remains and allows them to build pretty much equivalent hardware for the internal market where IP issues are more difficult to enforce for cut rate prices.
It it certain that some knockoffs are 100% duplicates of the real things, coming off the very same factory floor as the Brand Name version. This is completely common in contract food manufacturing and commodities handling but less obvious with engineered products.
Some are straight up theft of a manufacturer’s IP, tooling, design, logos. It’s really tough to tell sometimes.
How would you know time-keeping reliability from a casual inspection?
Aside from the (lack of) warranty issue and not being to access repair services associated with the real thing - in the case of knockoff electronics, software updates are problematic. Unwitting buyers of counterfeits of a well-known Chinese IP security camera brand have reported that their cameras froze and became useless when they tried to install company software updates.
It’s a huge problem. And it’s a very serious problem for the military, as counterfeit components such as ICs, transistors - event nuts and bolts - have found their way into military hardware. Tens of millions of dollars are being spent in an effort to combat it.
It’s even more of a problem for commercial OEMs; at least critical military/aerospace/defense products are generally built to MIL and NAS specs which require certification documentation, and while that can be faked it can at least be traced back to a particular supplier. I’ve been involved in numerous investigations of counterfeit materials and fasteners but the first was for an aerial manlift manufacturer where the bolts that held the bull gear (the mechanism that allows it to rotate the turret and platform) onto the chassis started showing signs of fatigue and cracking. We never got to a true root cause but the supposedly SAE Grade 8 bolts that supposedly came from one source were traced to at least five different overseas suppliers, and tensile testing on an Instron tester in a certified test lab showed more than a -30% variation in ultimate tensile strength as compared to specifications. And these fasteners came from a major national supply house which any engineer would recognize, and were ‘assured’ to meet spec.
I remember seeing a number of SBIR solicitations over the last decade looking for anti-counterfeiting solutions. I’d imagine the problem is with items that are commodity parts in the real world with numerous suppliers - I can’t see a successful counterfeit of ICs designed for specific DoD/space applications from a single supplier.
Is the problem mostly counterfeit marking and paperwork - far arguments sake re-marking a generic 555 timer as a mil spec 555 timer from a qualified manufacturer (just a random example of a dirt cheap IC, I don’t know if there are any mil spec 555 timers)? Maybe packaging die in what looks like a hermetic package but really isn’t? Marking a non-rad hard Xilinx chip as rad hard? Has introducing distributors into the supply chain made counterfeiting easier?
Yes, in the case of things that have a commodity counterpart (most fasteners, rechargeable battery cells, discrete electronic components, et cetera) it is easy to package up and fake documentation, especially because these things are largely built overseas (from the US) and come through a chain of suppliers making it cost prohibitive to actually supervise or inspect production facilities the way that is done with larger components and end-item assemblies. It is often suggested that the government use the Defense Production Act to ensure domestic production, but for highly technical components and devices that have low volumes compared to non-recurring or maintenance costs it just becomes too expensive to maintain the industrial base.
Back in the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ post-production and deployment days, the gyroscopic element of the guidance system (which were produced domestically, of course) started having some issues, and the production line had to be stood back up and the experienced technicians who worked on these extremely complex electromechanical systems brought back in at extraordinary cost to work through solutions. It would have been smarter to just maintain low rate production so there was an experienced workforce and facilities to do this work but the missile was just getting deployed right as the entire purpose of it was being obviated by the end of the Cold War, and there was no need to build even a couple of dozen of these a year for the foreseeable future, nor was there any commercial use for such an expensive and highly precise gyro, and of course today we would just use electrooptical ring laser gyros, so it was the right decision but it illustrates the difficulty of maintaining an industrial base for a niche application.
I went to China for a conference a couple decades ago. I enjoyed going to the markets and bought back a random selection of stuff including some knockoffs. Half of the stuff was of very high quality. Half of it disintegrated or broke pretty quickly.
I know a cop who specializes in counterfeit items. There are usually ways to tell. His biggest concern was about electric items, which might plug in, and might be dangerous since (he said) the “approved by electrical standards authority” mark is often untrue.
Oooh - beryllium bearings. I wonder if Pittsfield, MA (where GE made gyroscopes) ever got that site cleaned up. I mean after they got the GE Large Transformer plant cleaned up.
Don’t ask how much the Title III people spent bringing up a domestic source of CMOS image sensors for star trackers. A lot for a product with a total available market measured in hundreds annually…