Xiaomi

Xiaomi is a multinational electronics company based in Beijing, China. Founded in 2010, the company has quickly become one of the world's leading smartphone manufacturers and one of the largest businesses in China. Xiaomi has expanded its product offerings to include a wide range of consumer electronics, including smart home devices, laptops, and wearables.

Xiaomi has a strong presence in Indonesia, where the company is committed to delivering innovative products and exceptional customer experiences. However, the brand's popularity has attracted counterfeiters and individuals who violate its intellectual property rights. These counterfeiters threaten to take sales illegitimately, wear down Xiaomi’s brand value, and put the company’s expansion into Indonesia at risk.

To maintain its growth in the Indonesian market and its customer trust, Xiaomi Indonesia recognizes the importance of protecting its brand reputation and intellectual property against counterfeiters and gray market sellers.

As the Head of Centralized Management for Xiaomi Indonesia, Farid Harahap is responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of the company's back-end functions, including legal compliance and intellectual property protection. Like many companies operating in today's digital economy, Xiaomi faces challenges when it comes to safeguarding its intellectual property and preventing the sale of counterfeit products.

Xiaomi Indonesia also has specific needs related to parallel import of its products. These gray market activities threaten Xiaomi’s intellectual property rights, as the brand chooses its distribution strategy carefully as it continues to expand internationally.

For Xiaomi Indonesia, getting a full view of its products’ presence in the marketplace is an immense task. Xiaomi’s products constitute an extremely expansive portfolio and with dozens of sub-brands under its name, it is essential to have a 360° view of its brand online. Manually investigating where, how, and at what price its products are being sold online on marketplaces would be an impossible task. Internal resources alone are not enough to handle the sheer volume of online infringements, counterfeits, and gray market imports.

To address these challenges, Xiaomi Indonesia has partnered with MarqVision. With our support, Xiaomi has vastly improved its brand protection efforts in Indonesian through a series of process optimization and technology implementations.

Xiaomi Indonesia carefully chooses 500 product assets out of its immense product portfolio to protect. Working with MarqVision’s team and using the Seller Intel Lab, they are able to strategically select which IP assets to protect.

MarqVision’s AI-powered software routinely scans key online marketplaces to find thousands of illegal accounts selling counterfeits and infringing on Xiaomi’s brand. These sellers are swiftly reported and removed from the marketplace. Data scraped from the profile and the listing allows MarqVision’s Seller Intel feature to easily find more illegal listings submitted by the same counterfeiters. Even when these new accounts are made using pseudonyms, Seller Intel can identify the account as a known counterfeit seller and report them.

Xiaomi strikes a balance between continuing its IP-driven business expansion strategy, investigating which products are most at risk for counterfeiting, free-riding, and parallel import, and upholding the company’s dedication to social responsibility.

Harahap highlights the exceptional value that Xiaomi Indonesia places on MarqVision's swift and diligent services. This has resulted in an adaptable and scalable strategy tailored to the specific needs and business model of various marketplaces.

By using MarqVision’s AI platform, Xiaomi Indonesia can now mitigate revenue losses and the impact on its brand reputation caused by counterfeiting, while also raising consumer awareness regarding genuine products. This is particularly important in the Indonesian market, where counterfeit products are a significant issue that contributes to the loss of national economic growth and job opportunities.

With the assistance of MarqVision, Xiaomi Indonesia has successfully mitigated the effects of IP infringement and counterfeiting within the Indonesian market. This has resulted in a 99% success rate in removing infringing listings from the market. Consequently, the company has been able to scale up its protection efforts without requiring additional effort, successfully detecting 5,000 listings per month.

This innovative approach to brand protection has enabled Xiaomi Indonesia to safeguard its brand and ensure long-term business growth within the Indonesian market.