Alibaba works with authorities to knock out knockoffs

Alibaba Group Holding said on Tuesday that the company has tracked down more than 90 million fake goods in the first nine months of the year and expects to further its efforts in the following years via big data and cooperation with government authorities.

The company has penalized nearly 1 million retailers on Alibaba's marketplaces - which include Taobao, Tmall and AliExpress - for selling counterfeit products, Shao Xiaofeng, chief risk officer with Alibaba, said at a press conference held in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, on Tuesday.

Recently, the Chinese e-commerce giant has made big strides to change its reputation as a hub for fakes, which experts said is a necessity for its move toward internationalization.

On Thursday, Alibaba revealed that as of December 12, over 200 counterfeiting gangs in China had been busted during a joint campaign between the company and police.

And on the following day, its customer-to-customer platform Taobao disclosed in a report that more than 3,000 patent infringement cases had been handled by the State Intellectual Property Office via data from Taobao since 2010.

Alibaba needs to continuously demonstrate that it is making an effort through carrying out crackdowns in a bid to pave the road toward internationalization as well as maintain US investors' confidence, Lu Zhenwang, founder of Shanghai Wanqing Commerce Consulting, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Globalization was highlighted as a theme of Alibaba's future development during this year's Singles' Day shopping festival on November 11, when its founder Jack Ma Yun said the company intends to forge this event into a global shopping spree in five years.

Alibaba has demonstrated its globalization ambition after floating on the US stock market in September, but it needs to step up efforts in overcoming counterfeit concerns, Li Qunying, director with the Department of Policy and Legal Affairs of the General Administration of Customs, said at the press conference.

According to Li, they just recently learned that US customs had found fake vehicle air bag imports from Alibaba's platforms.

Li and other officials from authorities including General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the National Development and Reform Commission all expect to strengthen cooperation with Alibaba to push forward the establishment of an online shopping credit mechanism and protect the international reputation of China's e-commerce.

Alibaba's major rivals including JD.com Inc and Jumei International Holding are also actively hunting down fake products being sold on their sites. Jumei, for instance, suspended doing business with third-party suppliers in July to prevent the risk of having fake goods on its platform.