BEIJING – China’s unbranded goods are often better than the branded originals they imitate, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba Jack Ma has said, posing an additional challenge to the battle against sales of counterfeits.

“The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better price than the real product, than the real names,” he said in a speech at Alibaba’s investor’s day in the southern city of Hangzhou Tuesday.

“They’re the exact factories, the exact raw materials, but they do not use that name,” he added. 

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China’s factories have traditionally churned out products for branded companies at low cost, but with the rise of e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, they are increasingly finding opportunities to market their own goods online directly to consumers.

More than IP problems or fake products, it was this shift to a new business model that was “destroying” traditional brands and “revolutionizing the whole world”, Ma said, noting: “The way of doing business has changed.” Alibaba has come under fire in recent years for the ease at which knock-off goods are available to consumers on its online Taobao marketplace.

Taobao is estimated to hold more than 90 percent of the domestic consumer-to-consumer market, while the company’s Tmall platform is believed to have over half of China’s business-to-consumer transactions.

As the leading force in China’s e-commerce industry, Ma said Alibaba could handle the problem of counterfeits “better than any government, any organization, any people in the world”, but that a continued market for cheap knock-offs was unavoidable. 

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“We cannot solve the problem 100 percent, because it’s fighting against human instinct,” he said.

Yet the company’s efforts to date have been the subject of increasing scrutiny.

“It’s inappropriate for a person of Jack Ma’s status to say something like this,” Cao Lei, director of the China E-Commerce Research Center in Hangzhou, told Bloomberg News.

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

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JAKARTA – An Indonesian bombmaker inspired by an Islamic State extremist was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison for plotting to blow up a Buddhist temple on Java island.

The court heard that Ibad, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, received funding and guidance for the attack from Bahrum Naim, a radical Islamist linked to the January suicide attacks in Jakarta that left eight people dead.

Three others – Sugiyanto, Saifudian and Yus Karman – were also found guilty of terrorist offences in a Jakarta court and sentenced to four years and eight months over their role in the failed bomb plot. 

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Ibad’s lawyer said his client had been lured by Naim through social media to carry out an attack. The two had known each other for many years before Naim travelled to Syria and rose to notoriety among Indonesian extremists fighting for the so-called Islamic State group.

“Ibad is Bahrun Naim’s childhood friend,” the lawyer Kamsi told AFP outside the East Jakarta courtroom.

“Naim lured Ibad to join him by saying it was easy to get a job in Syria, and told him to detonate a bomb in Solo.” Naim sent cash via an Indonesian bank to fund the operation, the court was told. Ibad handled the cash and recruited the others to find a suitable target in Solo, a midsize city on the main island of Java.

The group assembled a bomb but were arrested by police just days before launching their attack.

A sustained crackdown in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, weakened many of the most dangerous extremist networks responsible for a string of deadly homegrown attacks during the 2000s.

But the attack in downtown Jakarta earlier this year, the first claimed by IS in Southeast Asia, sparked fears of a resurgence in militancy.

Police alleged Naim masterminded the attack from Syria, where his exact whereabouts remain unknown. Four militants and four civilians died in the coordinated suicide bomb and gun attacks carried out in broad daylight in the Indonesian capital.

Police believe hundreds of Indonesians have travelled to Syria to fight with militant groups including IS.