Alibaba’s Lazada Launches Southeast Asia’s First E-Commerce Anti-Counterfeit Consortium

In conjunction with an IP Week organized by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, Alibaba‘s regional e-commerce platform Lazada came together with leading brands, including HP Inc. and BMW, to announce the launch of Southeast Asia’s first e-commerce anti-counterfeit consortium, according to a statement by the platform on September 7.

The consortium is named Southeast Asia eCommerce Anti-Counterfeiting Working Group, or SeCA Working Group.

In its composite declaration, the consortium committed to collaborating with all relevant stakeholders to address rapidly evolving issues of counterfeit trade in online retail, and to support each other in their intellectual property rights (IPR) and consumer protection efforts in the e-commerce environment.

At its launch event, the SeCA Working Group unveiled plans to provide an online directory, accessible at secagroup.org, which will house the respective IPR protection policies, programs, tools and resources offered by Lazada to support IPR owners in their efforts to manage and deter IPR-infringing activities on the participating platforms. It will also serve as an accessible repository to educate the public on IPR protection matters online.

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Southeast Asia is developing at a rapid pace. However, in a report published in 2019 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), half of the countries in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, were listed among the top 25 economies for counterfeit and pirated goods between 2014 and 2016. Booming e-commerce, the intensive use of social media platforms and most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, have become major factors for the counterfeiting issue in the region.