J&W Technology's Official Statement

After they were identified as the manufacturer of the counterfeit DFI motherboards, J&W Technology issued this official statement on the issue.

Official declaration to rumors spreading in the Indonesian market

14th April, 2008.

Dear all J&W distributors and customers,

Over the last week, we have received many enquiries from our distributors and OEM customers concerning the fake ‘DFI” branded motherboards case discovered in the Indonesian market.

We checked in details with those information provided by them and we noticed that those board pictures were taken from our high-quality motherboards manufactured; yet, they are not branded as “DFI” by J&W. We must emphasize that we did not and this is an official declaration.

After tracing all our sales record to the Indonesian market, we found that on January 2008, a company named “Tiga-Dimensicom” had purchased a certain quantity of MCP68PV and MCP73V motherboards from J&W, which they claimed are for OEM & project purpose, and no J&W brand logo should be included in the motherboard, manual, driver disc and BIOS as requested. (Note: We may provide evidences to related parties upon requests, but we will not disclose them here.)

These motherboards left our factories legitimately without any infringements. We did not, and we absolutely would not support this kind of infringement activities, which is illegal and immoral.

During these few days, we also received reports that the Indonesian and Philippines distributors of one of the motherboard manufacturers accused us, J&W, for making such faked motherboard under the “DFI” brand name. We hereby declaring that we did not, and will never, manufacture pirated products which would infringe the intellectual properties/ copyrights of other parties. We only produce OEM/ODM products for our customers under their brand names when authorized. We hereby also condemn these types of activities conducted by them to discredit our company’s image and are asking for a STOP of that. We reserve all the rights for legal actions against them.

Yours sincerely,

J&W Technology Limited

Our Thoughts

Frankly speaking, J&W Technology's explanations seem to be very thin. Although we cannot be certain, we can certainly poke some holes in their explanations.

First of all, they claimed that they manufactured and sold a batch of unlabelled motherboards (including accessories) for Tiga-Dimensicom in January, 2008. However, the quantity of counterfeit DFI motherboards sold in the Indonesian market is probably higher than that single batch of motherboards. DFI and their Indonesian distributors will certainly be looking at quantity of these counterfeit motherboards in the market.

Usually the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) is 1000 units. Unless they are confident of selling a huge number of motherboards, it would be logical for Tiga-Dimensicom to order in small quantities, a few thousand motherboards per batch than risk it all by buying 20 or 50 thousand motherboards at one go. After all, they could get caught and shut down before selling their entire stock.

There's also the issue of cash flow, as they probably have to come up with the money upfront. Buying many motherboards at one go is going to need some serious cash. Nobody's going to give you credit for a single purchase and even if you get it, you can't sell that many motherboards so quickly. In short, it's quite unlikely for the whole operation to revolve around a single batch of motherboards.

As for their assertion that the motherboards and accessories were unlabelled, that's only believable as far as the accessories are concerned. Yes, stuff like boxes, manuals and CDs are easily fabricated. Anyone can do that. However, if you take a look at the larger picture of the fake DFI MCP73V motherboard here, you will see that it has the DFI logo silkscreened onto the board itself. The DFI MCP68V motherboard has the DFI logo silkscreened onto its chipset heatsink instead.

It could be possible for Tiga-Dimensicom to do it but we do not think it's easy for them to silkscreen the logo on the motherboard or the heatsink by themselves. If they got someone else to do it for them, then that would have incurred additional cost, something which goes against the purpose of their deceit - to make as much money as possible.

Of course, we are just speculatively poking holes at their explanations, the same thing people at DFI would be doing as well. It would be interesting to see what's DFI's response to J&W Technology's statement, and what happens next. This issue has certainly aroused a lot of interest and we are sure that many other motherboard manufacturers (ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.) are now scrambling to check if there are similar counterfeit motherboards sporting their brands.

If you have opinions or insights on this issue, please share it with us!

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