From cheap goods to telecom: How China’s industrial hegemony and guerilla marketing tactics can hurt India
OP India
August 13, 2020
Be it the battlefield or business environment, Chinese have always tried to strain India’s economy in all possible aspects. After conquering and destroying the smartphone manufacturing market, Chinese companies are yet again ready to barge-in and take over the telecom equipment/ infrastructure space.
While there are supporters of Chinese players giving the logic that they provide products and services at a cheaper rate than other players, but one has to wonder how is it, that only the Chinese companies can often offer disruptive pricing and no other players or indigenous or any other foreign players can afford to sell products at that price?
The answer to this question is that while other players focus their energies on developing and bringing new technologies, the Chinese focus on stealing patented and unpatented technologies from around the world through sophisticated cyber-attacks, thereby developing cheaper products. China often rides on the back of copied technologies with an agenda to destroy the domestic industry in the strategic core sectors of the target nation. In fact, due to them simply stealing the technology, their costs are vastly low because they hardly have to invest in Research and Development.
Several years back, Chinese companies set up production facilities outside India to circumvent the Indian judicial system to benefit from brazen and unlicensed use of copied and stolen Indian intellectual Property to supply to the world. Then, they tested waters by exporting goods such as optical fibre and cables to India, that were made by unlicensed use of Indian intellectual property. They successfully circumvented Indian scrutiny and Intellectual Property system by routing supplies through a complex maze of legal entities. They got bolder with their brazen and aggressive Intellectual Property theft and started importing machines using copied Indian technologies such as optical fibre draw towers to set up factories in India.
In 2019, Delhi High Court had restrained ZTT India Pvt Ltd. from marketing optical fibres manufactured using technology which had been patented by an indigenous leader of optic fibre manufacturing in India. Similarly, the World Bank has also banned the company of fraudulent practices under the Lusaka Transmission and Distribution Rehabilitation Project in Zambia.
As the final battle to control Indian telecom infrastructure begins, Chinese are coming armed again with copied Intellectual Property technologies, and hence with no need of investment on R&D, to manufacture cheap optical fibre and cables in India.
Comments
Post a Comment