Russians have shown enthusiasm for buying counterfeit goods

The first places were taken by clothes and footwear

Counterfeit goods take over the minds and wallets of Russians: judging by the results of a recent opinion poll, 34% of citizens are ready to buy fake goods, not seeing anything shameful in this. What is it – a consequence of the steady decline in real incomes? Or, rather, is the situation connected with the departure of dozens of Western brands from the country and the growth of the shadow sector? One thing is clear: there is nothing good here – neither for the economy as a whole, nor for each individual consumer.

Counterfeit refers to the sale of products under a third-party brand without the permission of the copyright holder. To do this, unscrupulous manufacturers completely or partially copy other people’s trademarks, confusing potential buyers. Counterfeit goods should not be confused with original goods that were imported into the territory of the Russian Federation under the parallel import procedure and have all the necessary documentation. The only thing that distinguishes them is the way they appear in the country.

The most popular counterfeit goods among the population are clothing and footwear (40%), and illegal tobacco products (22.5%) and food products (21.9%) are also in high demand. And very rarely do people buy non-original auto parts (2.1%) and software (3.5%), follows from the October HSE survey. The main distribution channel remains unorganized retail (bazaars, markets, flea markets, as in the 90s) and the Internet, with more than 80% of online sales coming from ads on social networks. The specifics of online commerce is that on marketplaces, the buyer cannot check the authenticity of the product in advance, “feel” it.

The share of illegal products in the domestic market went into rapid growth in covid 2020, mainly in the fields of pharmaceuticals, alcohol, consumer electronics, perfumes, personal protective equipment. Today, according to experts, the turnover of non-food counterfeit products exceeds 6.5 trillion rubles. Moreover, an extremely high percentage of fakes is recorded in regions with the lowest salaries in the country, for example, in the North Caucasian republics. The causal relationship is simple: the less a person earns, the more likely they are to look for a cheaper alternative. And the degree of its legality is the tenth question. That is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we are talking about a forced step, dictated either by the desire to save money, or by banal poverty.

Last year’s sanctions crisis, to put it mildly, did not improve the dynamics of real disposable income: at the end of the year, they fell by 1%, and in 2023 (taking into account the unscheduled December increase in housing and communal services tariffs, falling revenues from oil and gas exports and the non-stop increase in the budget deficit), the situation is barely will turn to face the Russians. The problem of their general financial distress is exacerbating rapidly, covering all new layers: according to one of the opinion polls, 59% of families can only buy food and the most necessary things with their salary. There is not enough money for anything else.

As for the damage from counterfeiting, in the case of citizens it is often a direct threat to health (say, when buying goods for children), and in the case of the economy, direct losses for the state treasury. For example, because of the “gray” schemes of clothing imports alone, the federal budget annually loses about 200 billion rubles. Informal imported products (mainly luxury clothing and footwear, sneakers, children’s goods) reduce the revenue of Russian manufacturers, forcing them to reduce output. The fake format is aimed at those consumers who want to have a product-copy of one or another prestigious brand, despite the obviously worse quality. And here the problem is rather in the plane of psychology: how to eradicate this natural tendency to own a prestigious thing from people’s heads?

There is another extremely controversial moment in this whole sad story. The government considers mandatory labeling of goods to be the most effective way to combat counterfeiting. Which, in particular, are subject to shoes, tobacco, medicines and perfumery products. But today, many enterprises in the real sector of the economy resemble a comatose patient: there is no access to credit products, there is no opportunity to increase production, there are no raw materials and components. In order to survive, and in order to somehow attract impoverished consumers, the most vulnerable businesses have to trade in inexpensive counterfeit goods – life itself pushes them into the shadow sector.