No one utters a word, not a sound, as I recall the raid I went on with Chinese police in a tenement in Guangzhou and what we discovered when we walked in: two dozen sad, tired, dirty children, ages 8 to 14, making fake Dunhill, Versace, and Hugo Boss handbags on old, rusty sewing machines. The room grows absolutely silent as I put forth the facts: It is estimated that up to 7 percent of our annual world trade - $600 billion worth - is counterfeit or pirated that fakes are believed to be directly responsible for the loss of more than 750,000 American jobs that everything from baby formula to medicine is counterfeited, with tragic results that counterfeiters and the crime syndicates they work with deal in human trafficking, child labor, and gang warfare and that counterfeiting is used to launder money, and the money has been linked to truly sinister deeds such as terrorism. Every time I give a talk on the luxury business today and I get to the subject of counterfeiting, the same thing happens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |