Alibaba Employs Apple Former Executive To battle Against Counterfeits

Alibaba has hired Apple's former executive to remove counterfeits from its platforms.

Alibaba Group has recently appointed a new executive. The electronic commerce enterprise has recruited Apple’s former counterfeit-battling official to resolve its problem of counterfeits. Now, Matthew Bassiur is quitting his existing role as Pfizer’s Vice President, Deputy Chief Security Officer to work as the corporation’s Vice President, Head of Global Intellectual Property Enforcement in the next month.

This is a new job “to lead Alibaba Group’s industry-leading anti-counterfeiting efforts,” the organization elaborated in an announcement. Mr. Matthew would be reporting in to newly-recruited business head, Micheal Evans, who has previously worked at Goldman Sachs for a long time.

The Californian company’s senior director, Global Security and Counsel, Matthew led the technology giant’s investigative program into cybercrime, fraud, theft, threats and leaks. Matthew, who is known for Pfizer in 2011 directly after his two years stint at the consumer electronics manufacturing organization, used to teach IP law at the Beijing-based Renmin University under the FulBright program.

The Hangzhou based enterprise described him as one who has “deep familiarity with China.” The company avoided becoming a part of the most recent blacklist of the American government for counterfeits in December, but fake goods have remained a big problem as far as its business is concerned. At least from the perspective of brands that have fake goods sold through the Taobao marketplace of Alibaba.

As Forbes lately reported, the online trading giant has a strong team consisting of 2000 members and sophisticated application focusing on closing down shop owners selling fake goods the enterprise does not let many Chinese vendors continue to earn money from the sale of fake goods, so there is a compromise.

It would be interesting to find out how entrance of Matthew affects the organization. Separately, it made a confirmation that it has tapped Washington-based lobbying organization Duberstein Group for representing it on issues regarding counterfeits.

Knocked-off goods have remained a problem for Alibaba and its subsidiaries enough to be named in a recent report of the US Trade representative. It is significant for the company to demonstrate that it has controlled the issue as it makes efforts to appeal to shoppers outside of the most populated country, which Jack stated that would finally generate 50% of the revenue of the company.

“This is more of a China problem than anything, and it’s more of an e-commerce problem overall,” stated the company’s spokesperson Bob Christie, adding that it is often singled out over its rivals, including JD.

Between 2013 and 2015, Alibaba disbursed $161 million trying to battle with counterfeits on its platforms. It is known for employing 5400 phantom buyers who carry out the scanning of the webpage to search for fake products. However, the problem still prevails on the platform.