Knock-off Apple Watches go on sale in China
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I can’t believe this is a surprise to anyone. When you outsource your manufacturing — meaning that you have turned over all of the relevant intellectual property to the outsource supplier so they can build your product for you — what stops the outsource supplier from making a few for themselves on the side? Or, in the case of the Apple Watch, simply counterfeiting the damn thing lock, stock, and barrel and selling it for an “Apple can’t beat this” price via a Chinese online market?
I’ll give you another example: The HYS TC-9900 quad band FM mobile amateur radio transceiver which is selling on Amazon right now. HYS wants to sell you what appears to be an exact knockoff, down to the box it comes in, of the Yaesu FT-8900 quad band FM mobile amateur radio transceiver — for less than half list price (although you can buy the FT-8900 for a street price of about $500, and right now with rebates it’s just over 4 bills, so the HYS is a bargain but not that much of one). Yaesu’s proprietary ARTS™ and WIRES™ features are included, according to the HYS feature list, so you can’t tell me that this is just a simple look-alike piece of crap knockoff — HYS probably build the FT-8900 for Yaesu and have decided to get in on some of that sweet retail money themselves.
The only way to solve this problem is to bring manufacturing back in-house, where you can control it.