RIYADH — The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan (METI) held a series of anti-counterfeit seminars in Riyadh and Jeddah to aid the development of appropriate collaborative measures for tackling counterfeiting in the region.

The seminars held in three consecutive days were aimed to strengthen the knowledge of the relevant authorities on how to distinguish fake versus the genuine Japanese products. The seminars emphasized the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) and were attended by a broad selection of relevant individuals including 50 representatives from Riyadh Customs, 50 from Ministry of Commerce and Investment (MCI), 70 Jeddah Islamic Port Customs with MCI in Jeddah, Customs and Tariff Bureau of Japan, and a wealth of Japanese companies including Honda Motor, Isuzu Motors, Kao, Nikon, Panasonic, Seiko Epson, and Toyota Motor.

Masao Goto, director of Intellectual Property Rights, JETRO Dubai, said: "These seminars are very important to combat against counterfeit products. Counterfeit products are dangerous for consumers. For example, fake drugs may harm human healthy, fake spare parts may cause serious car accidents. And also counterfeit products damage the brand value. We would like to strengthen the cooperation on anti-counterfeit between KSA and Japan. Cooperation on anti-counterfeit is written as one of the Front Runner Projects in Saudi-Japan Vision 2030."

The seminar series, in which Japanese brands presented information on how to distinguish counterfeit items from genuine ones, was created in order to strengthen anti-counterfeiting in Saudi Arabia by providing relevant information to the related authorities, as well as sharing experiences and pitfalls of the past. This is an ongoing efforts to create a working relation and operations relating to anti-counterfeit between KSA and Japan.