Alibaba Delisted $90 Million Worth Of Counterfeit Goods Before Its IPO

Counterfeit products are a big problem that merchants and traders face while doing business in China. However, the world’s largest e-retailer, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE: BABA), wants to change that perception of China and that's why it delisted counterfeit goods worth $90 million from its website before its IPO.

Bloomberg's Olivia Sterns recently reported on how Alibaba dealt with counterfeit products, while Julie Hyman and Brendan Greeley provided their perspective on it.

"We learned from its chief risk officer that the company moved $90 million listings that may have breached intellectual property rights ahead of its IPO. The company had been facing scrutiny for selling counterfeit goods on its website. So, it looks like Alibaba, obviously it's bigger than the likes of General Electric and Procter & Gamble, is realizing it needs to be worried about its reputational risks," Sterns said.

Precursor To Other Chinese Companies

"Well and it was really aggressively prepping for that ahead of the IPO," Hyman said. "This may be a sort of precursor to what other Chinese companies and China itself is going to have to do as it opens more and more to the rest of the globe, which has different standards for what is acceptable and not acceptable."

Greely added, "This is something that the U.S. Trade Representative office has been trying to do for a decade and what accomplished it was just opening up the global capital markets. It turns out just access to American capital is more important to than access to American markets."