Trade in counterfeit brands escalates

Seizure of counterfeit goods across all sectors by customs, including optical products, has increased from 10 million items in 1998 to 128 million in 2007 according to Henri Venet, deputy manager of France's optical trade association GIFO.

Speaking to delegates at the recent EUROM 1 conference on counterfeiting and piracy in Windsor, Venet said that counterfeiting was 'much more lucrative than drugs and less dangerous'.

Delegates to the event hosted by the Federation of Manufacturing Opticians also heard that a single seizure of counterfeit sunglasses in Rome had a street value of €6m and that counterfeit goods across all sectors are believed to account for 5.3 per cent of Europe's GDP. Another statistic from a World Customs Organisation official revealed that a container of fake goods arrives in Shanghai every two seconds.