By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
Imitation luxury brand products valued at 1.3 trillion won ($1.2 billion) were confiscated at customs offices last year, according to government data Monday.
Customs officials made 733 goods seizures, with their value up 33.8 percent from the previous year, the Korea Customs Service (KCS) said. The number of confiscations also grew 2.3 percent year-on-year.
Fake luxury watches took the biggest proportion among the seized items, accounting for 33 percent of the overall value. Leather goods and clothes trailed with 24 percent and 12 percent, respectively.
The data also showed a majority of those products were made in China. In the January-to-November period last year, 58.6 percent of customs-seized knockoffs came from the country.
The number of confiscations of counterfeit imports has been on a steady rise over the last couple of decades.
It broke the 100 billion won mark in 2000 for the first time and peaked at as much as 2.7 trillion won in 2006, when a special investigation was conducted throughout the year. The amount dropped to 680 billion won in 2007, but increased in the following years through 2009.
Such a rebound is due to a showoff tendency in society where wearing expensive imported watches, for example, is taken as a status symbol, the KCS said.
Worldwide, the luxury market shrank around 8 percent in 2009, according to the global consultancy Bain & Company.
Korea, however, has witnessed a drop in ``exporting'' fake goods. Their share in overall knockoff confiscations in Japanese customs was tallied at 6.8 percent in 1,480 cases, plunging from 44.9 percent in 2005.
Korea was the biggest exporter of fake luxury goods to Japan until 2006, but the amount started to drop to below 20 percent from 2007 thanks to Korea's tougher screening campaign launched in 2006, the KCS said.
A joint international program was also initiated in 2008 to exchange information between the custom offices of Korea, Japan and China in order to curb illegal imports.
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