Jack Ma lays out Alibaba’s brutal new strategy in the war on fake products

Could this be the year that Alibaba finally gets a handle on the fake products available on its sites?

Jack Ma thinks so. The sometimes-elusive Alibaba founder popped up at an anti-counterfeit team meeting recently to enable and inspire. “In 17 years I’ve never missed any meeting relating to our anti-counterfeit team,” he said, “and I never will.” But he wasn’t just offering words. Ma promised that the anti-counterfeit team will have access to an unlimited budget and unlimited manpower.

With that money and manpower, Ma wants the team to change its approach. “For so many years,” he said, “we’ve been using traditional methods and measures to fight fakes, but the harder we fight, the more pop up. Today it’s time to let an internet company try and use the internet’s methods like big data technology to solve the problem.” The goal is to stop fighting reactively. Instead, Ma wants to go on the attack:

If before we were huffing and puffing to chase down and kill mice, now what we’re going to do is annihilating the environment the mice need to survive.

What that means, Ma says, is that Alibaba’s team will go after counterfeiters and IP thieves everywhere – not just on Taobao, but also on rival platforms like JD.com and WeChat.

“To determine whether you’re successful,” Ma told his team, “we’ll have to see whether or not you can give the counterfeiters no place to run and no space to exist.”

Alibaba will also be collaborating with Chinese police. That’s something the company already does to fight fakes, and representatives told Sina Tech that since April of last year, Alibaba has already assisted in the arrest of 715 criminal suspects.

No-no-notorious

From Jack Ma’s speech, it seems he’s pretty serious about turning a corner in the company’s battle with counterfeit goods this year. It’s not hard to understand why. Alibaba’s counterfeit and IP-rights-violating products have previously gotten it into both domestic and international trouble, and Taobao’s reputation as a haven for pirates is a stain on the company’s international brand.

At least for the moment, it’s a stain that’s arguably deserved, though. If you go to Taobao and search for your favorite video game and then sort price from low to high, you’ll almost certainly find pirated copies for sale. Ditto gear from your favorite sports team. Anecdotally, the site seems host to fewer fake and knock-off items than it once was, but the problem definitely hasn’t been eliminated. Can Jack Ma’s newly refocused team, with its unlimited manpower and budget, finally tackle counterfeiters once and for all?