VDMA7.3 billion euros in losses due to product piracy
Product piracy and know-how theft continue to cause considerable damage to German machine and plant manufacturers. China remains the biggest counterfeiter by a wide margin. The VDMA presented the latest figures on this at the Hannover Messe 2018.
... many measures are taken to prevent this from happening in the future. While 9 out of 10 companies now register intellectual property rights for this purpose, less than two thirds of companies pay attention to prevention through confidentiality and careful selection of cooperation partners. Surprisingly, there has even been a decline of around 8% since the last study, both in the latter two areas and in technical copy protection mechanisms. This means that only one in five companies is still active in the area of copy protection mechanisms.