On May 9, Guangzhou police hunted down a counterfeit Louis Vuitton production base in a remote town approximately 40 kilometers from Guangzhou. All the Louis Vuitton products produced there would have been shipped to Dubai.

China’s massive e-commerce firm Alibaba has built a partnership with French fashion brand Louis Vuitton. Now the two are teaming up to stop the sale of counterfeit Louis Vuitton goods. According to the 2016 Alibaba Intellectual Property Rights Protection Annual Report released last month, Alibaba has created a comprehensive system for fighting against counterfeits, replicas and other unauthorized items. The company has drawn a distribution diagram of 3,518 luxury counterfeit producers, and helped local police shut down multiple counterfeit production operations.

Beyond those small-scale production bases, there is a huge counterfeit industrial chain in China. According to statistics, which are not always exact in this arena, there are at least 100,000 people working in the counterfeit chain, and the counterfeits add up to an annual production value of over 100 billion yuan.

Louis Vuitton’s partnership with Alibaba has already been quite successful. In addition to those caught at the production base outside of Guangzhou, two other suspects from the same industrial chain were arrested in Dubai, where police found about 6,000 fake luxury items.

Alibaba has gradually become an important anti-counterfeit force. In April 2015, Alibaba helped the China-Britain Business Council with its counterfeit lubricating oil case; in May 2015, Zhejiang police worked with Alibaba to bust 244 counterfeit production bases, leading to the arrests of 300 suspects.

“Fighting against counterfeits is like struggling with the dark side of human nature; it will be a long war,” said Alibaba founder Jack Ma. 

The counterfeit Louis Vuitton production base