Philips shines a light on fakes

As counterfeit products become ever more sophisticated, spotting fakes is getting tougher. Electronics company Philips takes an all-round approach to tackling rogue imitations, as WIPR discovered.

Just a few years ago, the low quality of some suspected counterfeit goods meant that brand protection officials at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, could look at their packaging and easily spot they were fake.

Now, this ease of enforcement “has long gone”, says Jan de Visser, senior director at Philips Intellectual Property & Standards, following an enormous improvement in the sophistication of counterfeit packaging.

“Manufacturing and printing techniques have greatly improved, making it more difficult for people to know whether what they have in their hands is genuine,” he explains. “It really is astonishing.”