Anti-counterfeiting
A Rome Business School survey has revealed that Italy is the world’s fourth biggest victim of counterfeiting, after the United States, France and Germany, with total losses amounting to about 225 million Euros. All this has serious implications for employment: according to the International Chamber of Commerce, for the current year it is forecast that a total of 5.4 million jobs worldwide will be put at risk by the grey market.
According to the aggregate figures for the goods seized by the Italian Excise, Customs and State Monopolies Agency and the Financial Police, 208 thousand seizures of goods took place in Italy from 2008 to 2021, involving 617 million counterfeit articles, resulting in the removal from the black market of a value of more than 5.9 billion Euros (not considering these entities’ joint operations and not calculating foodstuffs, alcoholic beverages, medicinal products and cigarettes and tobacco). More recently the Financial Police revealed that in the first half of 2022 more than 3 million counterfeit articles were confiscated in Italian ports and airports, marking an increase of more than 150% compared to the first 6 months of 2021. If placed on the market, these goods would have generated a total value of almost four million Euros.
Some figures.
- In the first half of 2022 more than 3 million counterfeit articles were confiscated in Italy, an increase of more than 150% compared to the first 6 months of 2021.
- Art: 4 counterfeit artworks are sold in Italy every day and 45% of the art in circulation is fake.
- Cosmetics: the Italian cosmetics industry is growing (+9.9% compared to 2021), but it suffers losses of 935 million Euros every year due to counterfeit products. 21% of the Italian population purchased at least one counterfeit cosmetic in 2022.
- At the European level, it is estimated that 56% of seizures of counterfeit goods come from sales on the web.
- 27% of young Italians admit to having bought a fake product online in the last 12 months, and 24% to having used an online pirate service.
- The most widely purchased counterfeit products in Europe are clothes and accessories (17%), followed by footwear (14%), electronic devices (13%) and cosmetics, hygiene and personal care products and fragrances (12%).
- More tools such as blockchain, barcodes, radiofrequency identification, scannable tags and open source databases are needed to combat the counterfeiting phenomenon, and ways of using them which allow goods to be returned to the market with a circular economy approach must be developed.
Our clients’ demands are:
- reliable identification of every single object to give consumers value and establish trust;
- practical, reliable, secure authenticity certification of objects;
- sales channel identification to combat the grey market.
