Alibaba chief Jack Ma says fakes are better quality than authentic luxury goods

Alibaba has been accused previous accused by luxury good makers of tolerating the sale of counterfeits.

Jack Ma's comments came as Alibaba provided its first financial forecast since going public in 2014 (Getty)

Jack Ma, chairman of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, said many fake goods are now of better quality and cheaper than the authentic articles.

Alibaba, China’s biggest online retailer, has been strongly criticised for failing to do enough to stop counterfeit goods being sold on platforms such as Taobao.

“The problem is the fake products today are of better quality and better price than the real names. They are exactly the [same] factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names,” he said during a speech on Tuesday at Alibaba's headquarters in Hangzhou.

“We have to protect [intellectual property], we have to do everything to stop the fake products, but OEMs are making better products at a better price,” he added.

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) said that many products sold through Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall platforms infringed trademarks or were substandard, fake, illegal or dangerous, in a report published in January this year.

In May, Alibaba was suspended from the International Anti Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC) watchdog over piracy concerns.

Jack Ma’s comments are unlikely to be welcomed by luxury good makers.

Kerin, the company behind luxury fashion brash such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, launched a lawsuit against Alibaba, alleging that it encouraged and profited from the sale of fakes on its platform.

The American Apparel and Footwear Association wants to put Alibaba’s Ebay equivalent, Taobao, on the US government’s black list for fake products as the growth of the internet and e-commerce has increased the challenge for rights holders to protect their brands.

Cao Lei, director of the China E-Commerce Research Center, told Bloomberg that it was “inappropriate” for Ma to blame the high quality of counterfeit goods.

“For some individual cases what he’s saying might be true, but it’s wrong to generalize the phenomenon,” she said.

Jack Ma said in a statement released following his speech: “This is simply my observation of the issues facing brands and manufacturers. Counterfeiting is not a quality problem; counterfeiting is an intellectual property problem.”

His comments came as Alibaba provided its first financial forecast since going public in 2014.

Alibaba predicts sales are forecast to rise 48 per cent in the year ending March 2017.

Analysts were expecting 40 per cent revenue growth on average for the 2016/2017 financial year, according to Bloomberg.