U.S. Fights Flood of Fake Goods

By the time David S. Pearl II finally saw one of the knockoff versions of his company's refrigeration testing devices, the damage had been done.




For more than 35 years, Uniweld Products Inc. had painstakingly built its reputation in the air conditioning hungry Middle East. But as the cheap counterfeits entered the market, sales plummeted. Workers were laid off, consumer confidence destroyed.

The reason for Uniweld's misery sat before him, just out of an express-mail package: a Chinese-made, nearly identical version of the real thing, one of a flood of pirated American products, the bulk from China, that the United States blames for costing thousands of jobs, robbing companies of profits and seriously harming the U.S. economy's ability to compete.

In Pearl's case, the bogus equipment matched the original right down to the name, trademark, address and phone number of his manufacturing company's headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The differences, though, were crucial: The fake products cost half as much as the real ones, and they didn't work. Pearl estimated that over the years Uniweld lost well over a million dollars, a significant amount for a small company.

"You look at them side by side, it is absolutely amazing how well they copied them, and it's scary," Pearl, Uniweld's executive vice president, said in a phone interview. "The United States is a country of thousands and thousands and thousands of small businesses, who employ the majority of the employees in the country. For them to be hammered by Chinese counterfeits is a serious problem."