INTERVIEW
COUNTERACTING COUNTERFEITS MA Lighting and Avolites underline the detrimental impact of counterfeit products.
Words: Stew Hume Photos: MA Lighting and Avolites
In 2018, some of the biggest names in lighting control – MA Lighting, Avolites and MADRIX – announced that they were joining forces to tackle the ever-growing issue of counterfeit products. These efforts saw some immediate results, most notably from the Guangzhou Entertainment Technology (GET) exhibition of that year where counterfeit products were taken off the stands of exhibitors with the full support of the tradeshow organisers. This sent a clear message that this blatant wrongdoing was not going to be tolerated. However, six years on, the companies have expressed that this is still a troubling issue within the live events market, and in many respects, the practice of counterfeiting has worsened since the turn of the decade. “The issue is getting much worse,” asserted Daniel Kannenberg, Brand and Product Management at MA Lighting International. “One of the main reasons for this is counterfeiters have new ways to spread their misleading messages about their copies via social media and other online sales tools.” He went on to explain that this greater ability to mislead clients with confounding announcements to sell their online exacerbated the problem when the world began to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and events started up again. “Straight after the pandemic when people were trying to get back on their feet, budgets were understandably smaller and so the low prices these counterfeiters were offering looked appealing at a very superficial analysis,” he explained. Many of those buying these products did not realise they were not getting the genuine article. “For trying to clean the web from this fraudulent announcements that we’ve
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employed an external company to reduce and, in some cases, delete adverts for social media that are promoting the sale of counterfeit products,” stated Kannenberg. In fact, MA Lighting has a team of six fulltime employees continuingly tackling the complex issue of counterfeiting. “It’s offering an inferior product into the market at a lesser price and, in some cases, users don’t even know it’s a counterfeit,” explained Avolites Managing Director, Paul Wong. “That in turn affects us as that negative experience translates into what people think of the quality of Avolites products.” Wong went on to explain that the company had spent a great deal of money in recent years to create a secure system for their software. “It’s why I really make a point that counterfeit is theft,” stated Richard Salzedo, former Chairman of Avolites and now a consultant for the company. “It’s theft of everyone who bought a genuine console,” he added, referring to the investment people make into an Avolites desk that pays off the years of R&D and product innovation. “People also must realise that if they have a counterfeit desk, sooner or later something will go wrong with it and there is no support if it does.” Having been at the forefront of the battle for a long time, MA Lighting Director of Business Development Franco Zaghini, based out of Singapore, spoke passionately about the juxtaposition between theses counterfeiters and legitimate manufacturers. “First of all, those buying an MA counterfeit, they are inconsiderate, just basing on the cheaper price, not taking into consideration so many other factors, like poor quality of the hardware and instability of the software used on a counterfeited hardware, thus putting on
MA Lighting Director of Business Development, Franco Zaghini; MA Lighting Brand and Product Management, Daniel Kannenberg; Avolites Managing Director, Paul Wong.