htmlOn August 2, an LCD screen repair shop in Dashi Street, Guangzhou. htmlOn August 3, trucks came and went on the streets on Dashi Street in Guangzhou at night. disassemble, repair, recycling, reinstall, and private label. A rough assembly line is formed between the small workshops on Dashi Street.
. On the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo , the introduction pages of many TV products such as "Xiaomi Audiovisual", "Ace Good Products", "Kangka 4K" do not have the word "Dashi". However, this street located in the southern part of Guangzhou has a close connection with these products - most of the TVs on this platform can be traced back to the workshops here.
htmlOn August 1, the State Administration for Market Regulation asked the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Industry and Commerce to interview Pinduoduo operators and conduct serious investigations on issues such as selling counterfeit products and famous brands on the platform.In Pinduoduo, the "Ace Xinghong" TV with a trademark similar to the TCL Ace TV was removed from the shelves at the end of July 2018, with a total sales volume of more than 20,000 units, ranking among the top in search results. This counterfeit authentic TV is called a "counterfeit" TV. In a paper written by Tao Houyong, a professor at the School of Economics and Management of Wuhan University, explained that the term copycat originated from the Guangdong language department and was often used for mobile phones, referring to electronic products produced by unbranded manufacturers in Guangdong.
"Ace Xinghong" manufacturer is Guangzhou Tingtian Audiovisual Equipment Co., Ltd., whose registered address is No. 5 Kuanyu Street, Dashan Village, Dashi Street. Kuanyu Street is not a street, but it cannot be called Kuanyu. The tenement buildings on both sides can open windows to shake hands, and the potholes are filled with sewage.
To some extent, these counterfeit brands do not belong to a certain company, but to Dashijie. On this 19 square kilometers street, most people make a living by TVs, from a small piece of power cord to a large LCD panel, every part has a dedicated operator, and the cost of each link is as low as possible. Different stores are responsible for dismantling, repairing, recycling, reinstalling, and OEM, and open them between workshops in the cottage to form a rough assembly line.
"The whole Dashi lives on TV," said someone who once worked in the assembly machine industry here. These counterfeit machines were transported to home appliance stores and online e-commerce platforms in third-tier cities and urban-rural junctions, and some were sold overseas.
defective products and Internet cafe machines
On Xianghe Road, the main street of Dashi Street, there are three electronic cities, Weixun, Xianghe and Science and Technology Innovation, within less than one kilometer. There are stalls in the electronic city, and there are few vacant places. Almost every one has a sign of "LCD" with a whiteboard nailed to the wall, which reads the brands of manufacturers such as Qimei, BOE, and Huaxing. There are inventory counts and sizes, followed by the letters A or B. Most of their sources are divided into two types: defective products from regular manufacturers and second-hand appliances. The thickness of the
LCD screen is no more than one centimeter. The jargon of the counterfeit manufacturer is "glass". It is the most important component of the TV, accounting for about 70% of the cost. In Dashi, TV assemblers can find "glass" of different prices, ranging from thousands to dozens of yuan. There will be dozens of times the price difference between the sizes.
In the early 2000s, mainland China did not have the technology to produce LCD panels. The manufacturers of LCD panels were concentrated in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Copyright machines used second-hand or renovated panels eliminated by developed countries. Taiwan’s OEM factories are also an important source of panels. “We have a direct way to get goods from Taiwanese manufacturers, and any number of units can be done,” said a counterfeit TV workshop owner in a 2008 report from China Electronics News.
Around 2010, LCD panel production lines in mainland China were completed and put into production one after another. According to the "2017 LCD Panel Industry Research" released by Joint Consulting, by 2019, LCD panel production in mainland China will account for 39% of global production capacity. Nowadays, dozens of LCD screen production lines in China have fed more than half of Dashi's LCD screen stores.
Wen Tao, who has been engaged in the display panel industry for 13 years, said that these regular manufacturers directly supply to TV manufacturers such as Sharp, Sony, and Xiaomi. Some manufacturers on Dashi Street will also order from regular manufacturers. Due to the small order amount, they will place orders through regional agents, and the price is slightly lower than that of big-brand products.
However, even from the same source, there are differences in quality. Regular TV manufacturers have requirements for the number of bad points - less than one or two. The so-called bad point refers to pixel points with uneven colors on the screen. Before the LCD panel leaves the factory, the manufacturer will screen qualified screens according to customer standards, block ambient light, and conduct light transmission tests on each screen to ensure that each pixel point can evenly reveal black, white and three primary colors. "We have strict testing and acceptance standards, and the accepted screens will not be divided into A and B rules, only qualified and unqualified." Liu Hongbing, deputy general manager of Konka R&D department, said in an interview with the Beijing News. Only when the screens that are left by regular TV manufacturers will be selected by the screens, the price will be reduced and the agent will enter Dashi. Here, the A and B rules written on the whiteboard have nothing to do with professional testing, and are entirely based on naked eyes. "When you turn on the TV, you can't see the obvious bad point A, and you can see the B," said Dai Dao (pseudonym), who once engaged in the assembly machine business in Dashi. Regular manufacturers can often enjoy a one-year warranty service, and the warranty period of the screens flowing here will be terminated after the TV is installed. "If you can watch it, you can." On the regular LCD screen production line of
, there will be scrap in each production batch that does not meet the standards - this is also one of the sources of counterfeit TV LCD screens. The manufacturer will package it, weigh it and auction it, which is called "unified goods". "Originally, a screen costing hundreds or thousands of dollars may range from several to hundreds at this time," Dai Dao said. These defective screens were sent back to Dashi. The workers repaired the highlights and short circuits on them with lasers, and then assembled them into machines.
"United Products" sometimes hide tricks. Several interviewees said that Dashi's panel merchants sometimes bribe the staff of screen manufacturers, dismantle the completely scrapped screen into qualified finished products, and then mix the scrap screen in the next production batch to report a higher defect rate as a cover-up. Another main source of
Dashi copycat phones is second-hand mobile phones - Internet cafes and billboards. These monitors have been used in public environments for a long time, and the shell has been aged, and the screen is still available, so they will be "consolidated" to Dashi after recycling. The monitors in Internet cafes are updated so quickly that some stores specialize in this, and even directly type the words "Internet cafe screen" in the signboard.
In the eyes of "Internet cafe screen" sellers, any screen that has not been repaired is considered "A rule". "This is 32-inch, 240 yuan," said the boss who sold the "Internet cafe screen" to point to the screen that had just been disassembled at his feet. "The whole machine is about 500 yuan, 100 nesting material, and 100 module, which is only a fee for you." He said that if you add 20 to 30 yuan, you can get one year's warranty in case there are bad spots on the screen.
Old home appliances and cheap raw materials
cheaper are old home appliances and foreign garbage from the recycling bin. An insider who had been engaged in TV assembly in Dashi said that in Hong Kong, waste electronic products were sent to a place in the northern part of the New Territories after entering the port, where there was a large factory where workers disassembled the components, and after placing an order online, they were transported back to Dashi, and were repaired and reinstalled together with domestic recycling. Another part of the
TV set - the shell, also uses recycled products and foreign garbage as raw materials. Foreign garbage entered China from Dali Town, Nanhai District, Foshan City, Guangdong Province. After classification, it was transported to the factory of Dongguan with domestic waste. Modifiers were added to enhance strength, and then mixed with cheap talc powder to reduce costs. It became plastic particles and poured into molds to make a TV shell.
modifier is not enough to cover up the innate shortcomings of the raw materials. According to the national standard (GB 8898-2001), the TV shell should have sufficient strength to resist the effect of external forces. "If you break the shell of a regular large factory, at most, the color will turn white. The shell here will break as soon as it is broken." Dai Dao said. Not to mention other standards of
, in the national standard (GB4706.1-2005), the shell needs to meet the flame retardant requirements and a flame retardant needs to be added. However, flame retardants are expensive. In order to control costs, some manufacturers add less, and some do not add them at all.
"The competition here is too fierce, all prices are minimized and transparent," said a boss selling second-hand LCD screens.There are two types of power cords in parts stores, one is 4 yuan and the other is 3 yuan. The former has copper wire wrapped in the outer skin, while the latter has been cut off and the copper-plated aluminum wire is exposed. "When the quantity is large, the price difference is only a few cents," said a boss at an old home appliance recycling station. "Aluminum wire can only be used with very counterfeit TVs."
However, Dai Dao said that if there are no special requirements, the manufacturer will use aluminum wire by default. Cheap raw materials mean low conductivity, high electrical loss and low corrosion resistance. Long-term power-on and high temperature, the thinner the aluminum wire, the higher the resistance, and the rubber included in the outer layer has not undergone anti-aging experiments, which inevitably leads to fire hazards.
He asked Dashi's colleagues if they were worried about the hidden dangers. The other party was rumored: "It is safe to do it more fine. If the current is high, it will be broken. If it is broken, it will be fine?" Even if a TV makes hundreds of yuan, it is unwilling to spend a few cents to exchange for a copper wire. Dai Dao said that this wire eventually became the reason why he evacuated Dashi.
htmlOn August 3, TV parts can be seen everywhere in Dashi Street and alleys. htmlOn August 5, in a small alley, there were panel sales and repairs, parts sales and other stores in Dashi Street, Guangzhou. Photography/Beijing News reporter Pang Bao The small workshop in the narrow alley
is next to the alley on Xianghe Road, and advertisements for "popular shops for rent" and factories for rent can be seen everywhere. The driving route of the electric tricycle is the production assembly line here. It bumps through the alley, pulls the old TV in the recycling station to the disassembled store, and then pulls the disassembled screens and parts to the repair shop. Finally, the circuit boards, LCD screens and other parts are purchased by the downstream assembly factory and assembled into a new machine. In the alley of
, abandoned TV shells and green circuit boards can be seen everywhere, and corrugated boxes with "SmartTV" printed on it are piled up by the wall. There are stalls three or five meters square in size, and many of them don’t even have signs - most of them deal with experts, and they can see the type of business at a glance.
An old man was sitting on a small stool at the door of the store, wrapped his fingers with a bandaid, took a scissor, picked up and peeled the wires on the ground, peeled out the copper wire and weighed and sold them. He bought old TVs from recycling bins everywhere and split them into parts. The copper wire and plastic shells can be sold by weight, while the usable TV panels cost more than 100 yuan. In another shop a few steps away from
, the boss has a green circuit board on his hand. If it is removed from the old TV, what is still usable will be installed into a new machine. "I usually keep it in the house and don't look at it every day. Even if it is a second-hand one, there is no problem," said a circuit board seller. The stall opposite
sells second-hand LCD panels. The sign says "Repair bad points, highlights, and linear screens". A room with a square footage of five square meters is both a workshop and a warehouse. A worker stands next to a repair workbench with a white light and the size of a desk. The ground is filled with LCD screens to be repaired. However, the repair results seem difficult to guarantee. The bad points and highlights may reappear soon after the computer is turned on. On the Pinduoduo platform, buyers occasionally commented, "I found that it was not a Skyworth TV after receiving the goods. I found that there were three highlights on the screen after testing the machine."
"Isn't it easy to have bumps on the road (bad points)?" A seller pointed to the TV that was hung on his wall of his house and asked, "The buyer who encountered quality problems was not lucky.
Even if the product is in question, it will still be called "perfect" by merchants on the Pinduoduo platform - "perfect level" means there are dark lines or highlights, while "perfect screen" does not have any thin lines or flaws, but has "1 to 2 small dots".
"The small workshop only retains the necessary production links, and product testing will not be done." Wen Tao said. The product needs to undergo stability and reliability testing before leaving the factory to ensure that the machine can operate normally under different weather conditions. "If you sell it to the northeast, you will need to be less than ten degrees Celsius and you will not be damaged. If you sell it to the south, you will need to have a humidity of 90%. "Each test takes at least 30 machines and 50 machines at most, and it will last for 3 months to simulate different weather conditions such as high cold, humid, and hot in the laboratory. "This time cost and experimental conditions cannot be achieved by a small workshop." Liu Hongbing said.
In an LCD screen repair shop, the boss took out one from a row of TV sets commissioned to the factory - there was no trademark on the all-black plastic border. Is the screen tempered, does it need to be connected to the network, and does it need to be marked? The boss said that the configuration can be determined by customer needs.
assembly plant is hidden in the industrial building. Dashi's merchants commissioned the factory to assemble, and each handmade fee is about 60 or 70 yuan. "The LCD panel is the most technical thing in a TV. There is almost no technical threshold for the assembly factory - this is a screwdriver assembly factory." said Liang Zhenpeng, an observer of industrial economy.
"The LCD TV production line of regular large factories is automated and there are few workers," Wen Tao said. 90 kilometers away, in Fenggang Town, Dongguan City, more than 2,500 employees in Konka's LCD TV production plant operate five automated production lines with an annual output of 5 million TVs. There are 130,000 people living in 14 villages and 6 blocks of Dashi. Many of them form workshops based on family units, ranging from two or three people to more than a dozen people. They have refined the renovation and reinstallation process of the TV, ranging from a power cord to a 65-inch LCD panel, as simple as building a protective wooden frame for a TV, and as complex as assembling parts into a TV, they can find specialized manual operators.
"Old TV renovation is the same as mobile phones. The cost is only a few dozen yuan, but the price can double it." Wen Tao said.
Dai Dao said that as long as you rent a shop, you can start construction - no need to apply for a relevant license, most business delivery is online. The curved and narrow alleyway provides shelter for the workshop. Even if law enforcement officers come to check, everything will be fine as long as you pull the roller shutter door.
htmlOn August 2, the Panyu District Market Supervision Bureau handled four factories in Dashi. Among them, the trademark users of "Xiaomi Ejia" and "Skyworth Ejia" were found to be suspected of trademark infringement, a factory that had quietly moved out was seized, and a factory with a registered address of a private home and no production was included in the abnormal business list. Now the doors of other factories are closed, and workers refuse to bring people to visit the production process, for fear of meeting staff who come to secretly visit.On Tianyan Check, many merchants whose registration location is Panyu Dashi have registered trademarks imitated genuine TV manufacturers. Although Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has registered several counterfeit trademarks including "SVMSUNG", "SVMSUNC", "SAMSVNG", "SANSVNG", "SAMSVNVG", "Samsung Vision", and "Samsung New Product SAMSUNG" are still emerging one after another.
The market of counterfeit machines
The big rocks are deserted during the day. The boss puts a few wooden tables to drink tea. The stall door is deserted. Many shop doors are closed, leaving contact information on the roller shutter door.
However, after nightfall, the streets of Dashi became active, the open-air food stalls were almost full, and the entertainment clubs lit up their signs. Couriers from all over the country were driving electric tricycles through the streets and alleys, and the buses were filled with "Xiaomi Audiovisual" and "4K ace". The guy carrying the cargo box comes in and out of the factory, and the trucks come and go. The driver unloads the boxes of goods, transports them to the workshop on the store, and then pulls the finished product away.
For Dashi, the share of Pinduoduo, an e-commerce platform that was established in 2015, is very small. The TV industry in Dashijie has begun to take shape in the CRT era (i.e., old-fashioned big-headed TVs), and has expanded rapidly in the past decade, closely following the iteration process from CRT, plasma to LCD. According to Sohu News' special report in 2008, there were more than 200 counterfeit machine assembly plants at that time, with an annual production capacity of more than 1.5 million units, which was equivalent to the annual shipment volume of regular manufacturers such as TCL and Skyworth at that time. Almost all transactions in
are completed by sending messages and calling. On Alibaba , the homepage of TV search results is almost occupied by Dashi merchants. More than ten companies have a monthly transaction volume of more than 100,000 yuan, and the largest one has a monthly transaction volume of more than 800,000 yuan. This Guangzhou Jiegui Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. is just a production workshop that occupies half a floor in the industrial building and consists of more than a dozen workers.
10 years ago, emerging LCD TVs were relatively expensive, with 32-inch TVs selling for more than 10,000 yuan. Relying on second-hand low-priced screen counterfeit phones, they quickly occupied the home appliance stores in urban and rural junctions and townships."Like the distribution model of counterfeit mobile phones, it is purchased and distributed across the country by local buyers, and small and medium-sized storefronts are sold to more accurate audiences, including rental houses and markets with high demand for migrant workers," said Zuo Yanque, general manager of the Brand Center of Zhongyikang Market Research Institution. "Consumers in urban and rural junctions have little demand for smart TV system upgrades and do not have so many choices," said Wen Tao, so counterfeit phones have been selling well in stores.
Dashi's customers are not just Chinese, but Indian and African customers wearing floral shirts are not uncommon. They bargain with their boss to buy big-headed TVs and plasma TVs that Chinese families have eliminated. "There is no warranty, and the shipping fee is too high - those used are the worst parts here," said several respondents. offline sales of
still require inspection, the seller will slightly converge, while sales on online platforms will become unscrupulous. A 58-inch TV is sold as a 65-inch TV. If the consumer does not measure it, there will be nothing wrong. If he is complained, he will refund a few hundred yuan. Later, the merchant simply indicated the "packaging size" in the small words on the product introduction page, and took out the screenshot when the consumer reported it. Even if you are complained about counterfeit goods or counterfeiting, it doesn’t matter. Each store often only sells a few products, so it is not difficult to close the store and open it again.
htmlOn July 28, Skyworth Group issued a statement saying that a large number of counterfeit products on the Pinduoduo platform seriously infringed on the rights and interests of consumers and Skyworth's brand, and asked it to stop the sales activities of related products. On August 1, the Internet Supervision Department of the State Administration for Market Regulation stated that it attaches great importance to the problems of selling infringement and counterfeit goods on the Pinduoduo platform reflected by the media. It has asked the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Industry and Commerce to interview platform operators, and requires Shanghai and other relevant local industrial and commercial and market supervision departments to conduct serious investigations and inspections on the sales of counterfeit products and famous brands on the Pinduoduo platform reported by the media and complaints and reports by consumers and trademark owners. On the Pinduoduo platform, several low-priced and high-selling counterfeit phones, such as "Ace Xinghong" with sales of more than 20,000 as of the end of July, were quietly removed from the shelves, and the suspected infringement of product names such as "Xiaomi Audio-Visual" and "Ace Good Products" were removed and replaced by a general term such as "high-definition LCD TV".In 2017, Taobao and Tmall changed the rules on Double Eleven, requiring electrical appliance operators to be corporate stores, and they must upload the brand authorization certificate (including brand direct sales) when publishing products, and they must provide the 3C certificate number of each product. The Pinduoduo platform does not require the product to provide a 3C certificate number, and there is no merchant indicating the product's certificate number among the products on sale. According to the Pinduoduo's merchant entry introduction page, you can enter as a personal identity as long as you submit the front and back of the ID card, a recent personal photo, a handheld certificate photo and a deposit. The full name of
3C is "Mandatory Product Certification System". As long as the products appear in their catalog must be certified, otherwise they must not be imported, sold out of the factory or used in business service places. However, counterfeit companies always have "passing the wall ladder". "There will be a special agency here to help you with 3C certification - as long as you pay the money, they will guide you to prepare materials and prepare samples to be tested," Dai Dao said. "Their inspection products are specially made", "making samples that meet the specifications at any cost, and they will get the same one for inspection every year."
After investigation by reporters, every product under Xiaomi, Konka and other companies will be certified by 3C, and the certificate number often points to A certain model, and a Taobao enterprise store "Shenzhen Fuhenghui Co., Ltd." with a registered address in Dashi Town, , has 10 products on the shelves in the store, with only one certificate number, and 23 products are hung under the number. "3C certification is an entry requirement for the electrical appliances sold in the market, and does not mean that all products are qualified," Liang Zhenpeng said, "and this phenomenon makes the product's qualification even less guaranteed."
However, the market is quietly changing. "This year, LCD panels and TVs have overcapacity and prices have plummeted. Regular products are sometimes cheaper than counterfeits. Why buy counterfeits?" Wen Tao said. In Dashi, a counterfeit phone owner offered a price of 850 yuan for the TV, while the prices of Konka and Xiaomi products of the same size are 828 yuan and 899 yuan respectively.
Dai Dao said that the price dive in the first half of the year has made LCD panel dealers feel the pressure, and several shops have moved out of Dashi Street. Zuo Yanque believes that in the future, genuine TVs may replace counterfeit phones and enter other home appliance stores, "good coins drive out bad coins."
Beijing News reporter Pang Bao intern Li Xiangmao
