Shimano steps up efforts to beat counterfeiters

Grey or Black? Grey is usually used to describe getting around identical products being wholesaled for vastly different prices depending on where you are in the world..  eg transhipping Jeans from Asia to the UK.

Manufacturers would love for it to be illegal.  Unfortunately for them in most places it's not.

The bagged rather than boxed Shimano parts are sold in bulk for OEM (original equipment market), i.e. for building bikes. They do however make into the retail market and are cheaper to buy. When I was in the bike trade they were only available to the retail trade via grey impoters, which represented nothing ilegal or dodgy. That is not to say that counterfeit Shimano parts might not come supplied in a bag but if we're talking about a large known cycle shop I would guess it's OEM parts.

Wow - that seems a lot more than UK inflation - 100% in 5 years

This is, like, a highly uninformed comment. 

Being the largest market share company isn't monopolistic. There are plenty of other brands that build competing products to almost everything they sell in the bike industry.

Pedals in the story - try Look, Speedplay(Wahoo) , Time. Plus many others
Groupsets, campagnolo, Sram
Wheels - well enough said...

You obviously fail to grasp what monopolistic means. Every market has a leading competitor. Shimano may be the largest but there is healthy competition in many areas

Shimano are not a monopoly,. 

There is good competition at the individual component level.  The market may be distorted on new complete bikes at certain price points though.

There could be similarities between computer software and PC sales with complete bike sales and Shimano components.

I don't think it is has a major impact on the consumer though.

Why you telling me?

I was just replying to the thread.  No it was not aimed at you.

While I entirely agree that they're not a monopoly, Shimano have been doing a lot to hurt that component-level competition. They introduced (and patented) 4-bolt chainrings. Then the last round of crank sets have slightly different shaping to the decorative front of the chainring, so that older ones don't quite fit (they're usable but don't line up and leave sticking out bits that risk catching ankle bones/shoes). Much of the 'product development' in Shimano's line up seems to have more to do with inhibiting third-party supply than it does to do with actually improving the user experience. 

Electronic shifting has good potential here - you can lock the device in with software so it will only work with the original elements. Maybe they sell the parts cheap, and hook you in to a subscription service ( l'm going to call it 'Premium Enhanced Metrics Analysis'), then your bike gets stuck in top gear if you don't pay the PEMA fee. 

Only it wouldn't have been accurate.

If Shimano had gone after companies legitimately selling 11 speed chains, etc... that would be monopolistic.

However, explain what is in anyway legitimate about making copies of Shimano products and trying to pass them off as genuine?

It will also allow Shimano to track parallel export/imports from countries where prices are lower and more successfully take blocking actions against companies trading in grey goods (i.e. those that were legitimately sold in country A) but would be infringing trade mark/patent rights in country B)). This will mostly help Shimano fix different prices in different regions at the expense of the customer. 

It feels as though Shimano partly have themselves to blame for the fact that their cheapest pedals are £80... Look's most basic Keo pedals are half that price (and I've stuck 20,000km on a pair, so they don't wear out quickly either). 

I fundamentally agree with a company's right to prevent counterfeiting, but part of the problem is a total lack of supply. It would also help if they stopped 'updating' things mostly for the purpose of killing of the 3rd party component suppliers (4-bolt chain rings, I'm looking at you ).  

Exactly this. An FMCG company tagged its returnable containers to discover which of its retailers were selling on to other smaller operators who were getting a lower discount, and was then able to crack down on the dodgy outlets.

The  barcode scan to help the consumer spot a genuine item valuable as a way for Shimano to get big data on where its products really end up. Even better, the customer is motivated to feed this info back themselves, directly to Shimano HQ. Genius!

Pharma is serialising because the national regulators require it as one way of reducing counterfeits. It is a hugely complex (expensive) process which requires global cooperation between regulators and the industry, through manufacturing and distribution. Although bike parts are expensive, they probably couldn't stand a full serialised, aggregated cost. 

Potentially you could include a barcode on a component that could be looked up on a Shimano server, but then you could simply clone the number. 

On the other hand, there are covert and overt methods that could be applied on packaging and the part that could make fakes easier to identify. 
 

Unique RFID tags on the item are in use by Decathlon: potentially you could blockchain every transaction of each item, but it's really hard to make it work on a huge global scale.

It's why I rarely buy on eBay, I am very savvy but I have been caught out and bought 2 counterfeit items. To be fair, I sent both items (photographic equipment) to the genuine manufacturer for them to double check and they confirmed they were counterfeit. They did say that they were the best fakes they had ever seen. And, kudos to them, they sent me new genuine items as a thank you for sending them for their team to examine. I was told once by a detective that around 70% of items on eBay are either fake or stolen.

Don't worry - the Glorious United Kingdom is totally sovereign now, so it won't affect us...