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Unique Identification Standards: Key to avoid Counterfeit

As per the Global Brand Counterfeiting Report 2018, total value of counterfeiting globally has reached to 1.2 Trillion USD in 2017 and is heading towards 1.82 Trillion USD by 2020 including counterfeiting of all equipment/products. For Indian market, where online retailing is expected to account for 3% of the retail market size by 2020, according to a report by PwC, counterfeiting provides a major challenge. The annual loss to counterfeiting in India amounts to 1 trillion per annum.

Counterfeit products pose 3 major threats:

Consumer safety: Typically, authentic products goes through various high quality control processes during the manufacturing and processing and are governed by safety laws which companies have to abide by.


Loss of revenue for brands and government: Counterfeit products impact the market share for authentic business and also reduces the revenues for both businesses, in terms of sales revenues, and the Government, in terms of taxes and duties.

Investment and innovation move elsewhere: FDI is an important channel which advances emerging economies unlock to productivity gains and output growth. The total reduction in FDI due to counterfeiting and piracy is estimated at US$111 billion, as companies will have less incentive to invest in a country where their IP could be stolen and used to displace their legitimate products with counterfeit products. 

Essentially a multi-layered approach, which will help in maintaining universal and uniform electronic pedigree across all supply chain stakeholders, is needed to detect and stop counterfeiting products from spreading deep in supply chains and instill safety among consumers.

The global solution to the counterfeit problem starts with a foundational layer of globally accepted supply chain standards, which act as building blocks. The use of standards-based Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) technology, i.e. in barcodes or RFID tags, encoded with serialized unique product codes (SGTINs) to identify objects. This helps in sharing information about the products consignments seamlessly among stakeholders to provide security and visibility in the supply chain.

The use of global standards based SGTINs improve collaboration, traceability, transparency, security, and visibility in the supply chains, enabling counterfeit detection at its very source.

Anti-counterfeiting technologies are broadly classified into overt and covert technologies. Barcodes & RFIDs make for the most common overt technologies used for product authentication. With the standards based serialized product identification using barcodes and RFID, brand can establish a track and trace system to ensure its supply chain security and keep a check on its movement.  

With standards like GS1 Global Traceability Standard (GTS), industries are guided to maintain farm to fork traceability of products in its supply chain. Sharing of this data, in real-time basis, can play a vital role in securing the supply chains and stopping the counterfeiters. In addition to counterfeit detection, these standards help in product recalling in accordance to the global regulations and document identification and authentication, such as trade licenses, skill certificates, etc.

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