Fake news
Social media has become a big thing today. We’re enjoying the many possibilities like communicating the latest news or product information with the world. However, the increasing media activities do have a shady side as well.
Fake news are a considerable thread today. The biggest concerns of the affected companies are the number of people who are going to believe what they read or hear and then, spread the news in minutes over the whole wide world. Is the news-spreading someone a respectful personality in the industry, the news will be true for the next level of readers. We can imagine that a lot of working hours in marketing and sales need to be invested to identify fake news and arrange necessary correction requests to the editors. As a matter of fact, fake news and unauthorized brand use is causing additional costs and damages to the affected companies. Generally behind every well-known brand like Krah is a quality assurance which is manifested in their quality and performance procedures. A high level of quality is the assurance to avoid failures in the project or causing even high costs by occurred incidents during the production. A name and brand was built up during years with a good marketing strategy and a good sustainable product reputation.
So what happens when a company is affected by fake news, where ideas and developments which have been collected since decades are simply stolen? Indeed the false information have reached many recipients and prompt actions are needed to reduce the damage caused by the fake news. Which court can be used? Social media is global and spreading fake news is mostly done by private people.Even our company Krah Group was a victim of such fake news, which circulated right after the Chinaplas 2017 through their organization company. The press release of the organization company Adsale Ltd. published a report of a Chinese company, who announced to be a Krah machinery and Krah Pipe producer. Alexander Krah, the CEO of the Krah Group was sent a lot of e-mails concerning the fake news. The Krah team undertook quick decisions and has published a press release and requested for corrections in the magazines. Many respective magazines get back to us promptly with the advice that they have used the report from Chinaplas 2017/Adsale Ltd. in good faith. Adsale Ltd. itself was also not immune of copying visitors to the Chinaplas. Even they are warning on their website that bogus companies are posing as Adsale and chasing payment for exhibition space at Chinaplas 2018.
Under the consideration of the seriousness of the issue and to protect the people in the industry, we informed the magazines about Krah, that we’re only producing machinery in Germany and only manufacturers with Krah Lines supplied from Germany are able to produce Krah Pipes. The respective magazines made necessary corrections immediately and published a corrected version of the report with the comment of Alexander Krah regarding the unauthorized use of our brand name in their magazines as well.
To protect people and companies from product piracy, fake news were converted into true news with the serious efforts of the magazines and respectful individual players.
Many companies are suffering from the unauthorized copy mentality of some companies from China and the law is unfortunately not able to provide an effective protection against brand piracy. Not only Krah faced these kinds of problems in Asia, big companies like Borouge made the same experiences. Mr Kum Hoon Lou from the raw material supplier Borouge reported a very serious and explosive case from the Gas industry. Pipe suppliers from China declared that their pipes are made of 100% virgin Borouge PE material. After some painful failures in the pipe system, the gas companies cut pipes and send some small samples to Borouge, where the lab is analyzing and determining if it was virgin Borouge PE material or not. Borouge offered the service for free and the percentage of fake pipes reduced drastically from 73% to almost below 10%.
Now we can imagine the estimated volume of the damage which is occurring for the companies and people, where all their hard work to create a brand by creating and developing technology are just stolen.
As a lesson we learned, brand piracy and copying is a serious issue and dangerous for people and companies. This behavior is absolutely not acceptable and ethically reprehensible.
So not everywhere where you read Krah it really is Krah! Our Team is now more present in the social media activities and investigates brand name violation through unauthorized third party people. We’re very happy that magazines are now more sensitive by publishing press releases regarding unauthorized brand usage. Krah machines are produced only in Germany and Krah Pipes will only produce on original Krah machinery from Germany.
To avoid any confusion if it’s a real Krah product or not, please ask us or the supplier for the Krah Quality Certificate, which will confirm that the supplier of Krah Pipes are producing with High German quality standards and performances of Krah.
Please feel free to contact us should you detect any of these “news” under This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Please see below an example of the Certification of quality for Krah pipe producers. This is the only way to guarantee that your product is a real Krah product.
There is no such thing like an authentication on Facebook, Twitter and so on.
The Krah Pipe Certification of Quality
Author:
Bülent Kuzkaya
KAT GmbH