Luxembourg loses €83 million annually to counterfeits

Louis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci… Prestigious brands are the main victims of a counterfeiting market that steals their name, logo, signature design – and potential revenue. In 2018, 20 intellectual property rights holders had issued no less than 1,156 notifications of potential breach to 44 state supervisory authorities according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But trademarks are not the only victims in this highly worrying trafficking.

The OECD estimates that counterfeit goods are increasingly important in world trade, accounting for 1.95 per cent of global trade in 2007, 2.5 per cent in 2013 and 3.3 per cent in 2016, reaching a value of $509 billion. Counterfeiting represented 6.8 per cent of products imported into the EU from third countries in 2016, worth €121 billion. In 2019, 91,868 cases were filed by customs in various European countries, 32 per cent more than the previous year, concerning 40.9 million items (+53 per cent over one year).