Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the tagging of bicycles, including e-bikes, as well as bicycle frames. Like those already used for footwear since last year, the tags are RFID chips applied to products by their manufacturer or importer to trace their authenticity and origin. Special equipment is needed to read the information, but Russian authorities believe that consumers will easily do it with a special app on a smartphone.
The tags are primarily intended to protect the local industry and consumers from counterfeit products supplied from China, produced with poor-quality parts at a cost between seven and eight times lower than the authentic products. The program had been demanded by Sportmaster, Russia's biggest sporting goods retailer, as well as Velomotors, the biggest bike manufacturer in the countries, and two other companies, Forward and Velobalt.
Annual sales of bicycles in Russia are estimated to be close to four million units per year, and this market has reportedly not been affected by the economic crisis in the country. The market is largely controlled by Chinese suppliers, and it is believed that the tagging program would let some companies, like Velomotors, expand production and shift from partial assembly to full-cycle production.
The government is introducing tagging of bicycles on a voluntary basis until May 31, 2020. After that date, the government promises to reconsider the project and possibly introduce compulsory tagging of all bicycles, as it has already done in the footwear industry, where tagging began as voluntary on June 1, 2018, and became mandatory last July 1.
Dmitry Chumakov, general director of a Russian consulting agency, Vector Market Research, said it was unlikely that the tagging would clear the market of counterfeit products until it becomes compulsory, since there are consumers in Russia who are looking for cheapest bicycles and don't care about their origin or their quality.
Earlier, the Russian government introduced compulsory tagging for fur coats, shoes and tobacco products on the domestic market. It is believed that this step has reduced counterfeit products on the relevant market, but this doesn't seem to be the case yet for sneakers, perhaps because there are still untagged products that have to be cleared throughout the supply chain.
