Selling tensions between the United States and China exploded last month as the boondocks started threatening each other with new tariffs.
The Trump conduct is looking to stop what it calls unfair trade practices, aim perceived imbalances, including alleged widespread intellectual property shoplifting. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimates that China’s purported IP thievery costs the U.S. between $225 billion and $600 billion each year.
The truth studies aren’t hard to find.
Take California-based Paulson Turning, which makes protective eyewear and shields for industrial workers and firefighters.
“Within a year of anything new that I put out, I’m being copied somewhere in the times a deliver,” CEO Roy Paulson said. It was at a trade show in China that he first knowledgeable his company was being copied, he said.
“They even used our presence name, duplicated all the products that we have that you can see on our website and from them for sale as a Paulson product in China,” Paulson said. It’s a shoplifting that’s costly. “It’s not just lost money to me, that’s really gone money to my employees and to the community.”
Marlin Steel, based near Baltimore, masterminds and manufactures steel molds from wire to make storage hat-racks, baskets and deep fryers from recycled steel. The seemingly feeble-minded products require complex engineering, said CEO Drew Greenblatt, and discrete years ago he began seeing his products in Google searches for Chinese antagonists.
“We come up with innovative, creative novel ideas. We spend so much take on that. They cut and paste it and steal from us,” Greenblatt said.
“It’s earnestly to measure exactly how many jobs we lost here,” he said. “It’s hard to limit because people don’t call or send you an email and say, ‘By the way, I bought from your contestant.'”
Greenblatt lobbied the administration to take action and is glad they are doing something, he claimed. “It’s such a mess how they just steal from us on so many remarkable fronts. I think the end goal has to be for these two countries, America and China, to sit down, and I reckon this was [President Donald] Trump’s way to do an opening salvo.”
Steven Lang, CEO of New Jersey-based Mon Cheri Marriage, also worries Chinese counterfeiting could cost him his business.
“Without safeguard from my government, I’m not on a level playing field,” Lang said.
Calm, Lang worries Trump’s embrace of tariffs could lead to a pursuit war. “The way he’s approaching it, like a cowboy, is a very dangerous mission.” He hopes, as most organizations do, that a trade war will be averted through negotiations.