Raid on illegal production
Overview
The company is engaged in the production and sale of spare parts for heavy vehicles. The customer’s business model is B2B. The specialization is narrow, the market is quite closed.
Challenge / Opportunity
At the end of the fiscal year, the company recorded a drop in turnover and a corresponding decrease in profits. At the same time, signals began to come from the market that counterfeit products were on sale. Vlasta-Consulting specialists procured questionable samples and provided them for examination to the client. The analysis confirmed the counterfeiting of the products, while the manufacturing quality was recognized as high (a number of elements were applied to the part using a more advanced method relative to the original). The task was to stop the production and distribution of counterfeit products.
Solution
Using the collected information, the organizers and the address of production were established. In the shortest possible time, a raid was conducted with law enforcement agencies to curb the illegal activities of this group.
As a result, hundreds of units of finished products and hundreds of blanks were seized. As part of the raid, additional information was collected on the suppliers and contacts of this group. During its subsequent analysis and comparative overlap on the previously collected data, it was found that in addition to the suppressed production, the market has one more facility, not inferior in scale to the first. Immediately after the raid, the development of a new target was launched.
The raid was carried out a few months after the first. The scale of the event and the number of seized products exceeded the previous one by an order of magnitude – preliminary investigation found thousands of finished products and thousands of blanks. Also, in this case there was an illegal production with the application of TK - in particular, thousands of tags were removed from the TK, ready to be applied to the products.
Outcome
Analysis of the market after the measures indicated a sharp decrease in the number of counterfeit products on sale. In fact, the only remaining offers related to the sale of leftover products, already put into circulation.
Thus, in the framework of the anti-counterfeiting program, two activities were carried out - both in illegal production and both with significant confiscations, which turned out to be enough to "clean up" the market. This was largely due to the active position of the company to combat counterfeiting, expressed in advisory assistance in communicating with sellers and establishing a channel of communication with their distributors, who also shared the situation on the market.
As a result, each ruble spent under the program led to the seizure of counterfeit products by 4 rubles, thus, the return on investment (RoI) amounted to 300%.