The report came from the group’s area managers in China, a very important market for Molteni & C. It was the end of 2018 and during a Shanghai furniture fair, they discovered that a Chinese company was offering, under the Hothing brand, some products «identical to ours. Faithful copies », remembers Marco Piscitelli, managing director of Molteni Group, one of the leading Italian furniture-design companies, based in Giussano, Brianza.
The reaction of the Italian company is immediate: «We have involved the embassy in Beijing and activated all the institutional channels – explains Piscitelli -. We could not remain helpless in the face of a fact that caused serious economic and image damage to our brand, moreover in a market in which we are investing heavily ». Today Molteni & C (the largest of the four companies of the group, which reaches a total of 365 million in consolidated turnover in 2019 and has about a thousand employees worldwide) is present in China with eight flagship stores and three shop-in-shops, to which five and two more will soon be added respectively.
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The judicial action
The first letters of formal notice, however, did not produce any results. “So we decided to rely on an important American law firm, specialized in cases of this kind, with long experience also in China”, continues the managing director. The legal action for copyright infringement and unfair competition began in December 2019, in the Nanjing Court, one of the most sensitive and attentive Chinese courts to issues of this nature. From that moment a long process began which ended only at the end of last February, with a negotiation in favor of the Giussano-based company.
The Italian group has in fact chosen not to sue: the economic compensation would have probably been higher than that obtained with the transaction, but the times would have lengthened and in the meantime the production and sale of the imitations would have continued. “We discovered that behind this story there were three companies – specifies Piscitelli -: Hothing that marketed the products, controlled by another company that produced them, and also a final retailer who distributed the products”. 108 pieces under the Hothing brand that were imitations of a large part of the Italian brand’s catalog. «The path of the transaction was the best choice – adds the manager -. We got everything we wanted ».
The compensation
The three companies had to recognize the intellectual property rights to Molteni & C, also compensating the damage to its image; they had to immediately stop the production, marketing and promotion of the 108 imitated products; and finally they had to destroy any warehouse stocks. They cannot be reconstituted in any form, either as a single shareholder or under another name, or through companies attributable to one of the three parties.