Fake hi-tech products all the rage in Vietnam

10:09, 18/09/2011

In general, no one likes using counterfeit products. However, Vietnamese young people nowadays tend to use fake mobile phones. This has made the fake mobile phone product most bustling than ever.

In general, no one likes using counterfeit products. However, Vietnamese young people nowadays tend to use fake mobile phones. This has made the fake mobile phone product most bustling than ever.

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Nowadays, fake mobile phones, which bear the famous brands of iPhone, HTC and Black Berry are being displayed for sale everywhere. The products are advertised by distributors as “high quality fake products” instead of “genuine products”, because the “high quality fake products” also have high prices and they can sell very well.

The ad pieces about fake mobile product shops can be found on many websites: “We only have first-class fake phones, using memory chips, not memory cards like second-class products”; “Here are first-class fake products at shockingly low prices”; or “We offer best fake products at lowest prices”.

The ad pieces all try to prove two things: their products are most similar to the real products and the products have reasonable prices. The fake mobile phones are really similar to genuine products in all terms of size, weight to design. Regarding the origins of the fake products, some distributors say they come from Hong Kong, while others say they are made in Singapore. However, people think that they are all from China.

A fake iPhone 4 can be bought at just 1-2.5 million dong, while other mobile phone versions are priced at between hundreds of thousands of dong to less than 2 million dong. The most expensive products are selling at 3-4 million dong at maximum.

Distributors now can live well with the sale of fake products, because they understand the Vietnamese youth well. The young people like using the products with well-known brands, but they cannot afford the sky high prices set for genuine products.

Therefore, they decide to use fake products which have similar designs and functions as the genuine products, but have the quite different prices. Especially, distributors also provide post-sale maintenance services in order to reassure the young consumers.

Using fake products and …trembling with fear

Pham Van Manh, a worker of a freight forwarding company in district 3 in HCM City, said that he once “tasted the bitterness” when using a fake iPhone 3G which he purchased at two million dong.

Manh said that he was once so proud of the fake mobile phone which was so beautiful. However, the battery got broken down just one month of using. He spent time bringing the battery to the shop during the warranty time, but he was told that it was his mistake of wrongly following the charging procedure.

Hanh got a lot of troubles with the iPhone, when the phone suddenly turned off when battery ran out just after two hours of using. “With two million dong, I could have purchased a genuine product. You would rather use a good product, even though it is not beautiful, than using a low quality product,” he said.

“When you use counterfeit products, you always feel worried, because you cannot anticipate when the products get broken down,” he added.

Another young consumer, who once used a “copied” mobile phone, said that he was told that the mobile phone has Wi-Fi network, but in fact, it was unable to access Internet, while the camera only created bad pictures. And the biggest problem of the mobile phone was that it did not have any operation system.

“It’s ridiculous that a smart mobile phone does not have operation system,” he said.

Fake products still favored

The owner of the mobile shop on Lac Long Quan Street in HCM City said that he sells 10-20 copied mobile phones a day.

He went on to say that the demand is high, because young customers nowadays tend to like hi-tech products and refuse other normal products. Some of them want to show people and colleagues that they use luxurious products. This explains why even counterfeit goods can be sold at millions of dong.

(Source: SGTT)