Issue #0720/2 - It seems that Pelikan Hardcopy in Germany has been selling Hewlett-Packard originals repackaged to appear to be Pelikan remanufactured product. Hewlett-Packard is not impressed!
Pelikan Hardcopy is one of the oldest European suppliers of stationery equipment and printing supplies and yet it has recently fallen foul of Hewlett-Packard’s determination to stamp on third party supplies activities that contravene its product patents or intellectual property.
Most concerned about counterfeiting, Hewlett-Packard has not only had cause to file a lawsuit against Pelikan for infringing patents on colour inkjet cartridges but has now filed a lawsuit based on the principle of ‘unfair competition’. Hewlett-Packard believes that certain Pelikan products are not ‘remanufactured’, as described on the packaging, but are in fact original Hewlett-Packard products – repackaged!
H06 = HP57When inkjet cartridges are remanufactured by third party supplies companies, it means that the cartridge has been cleaned and refilled with third party ink. It is not possible for a third party to manufacture integrated inkjet cartridges (with integrated print head) because of all the patents involved in print head design and manufacturer and the complex technology of the product. So, any third party inkjet print cartridge product is, by definition, an original cartridge containing third party ink.
This means that Hewlett-Packard does not need to look at the cartridges themselves but at the ink. Clearly, in this instance, the company has found that the cartridges found in Pelikan packaging actually contain genuine Hewlett-Packard ink - bizarre.
Perhaps one might argue that Pelikan has bought ink from the same ink manufacturer that Hewlett-Packard buys its ink from. Were this the case, then Hewlett-Packard would have serious contractual and confidentiality issues with that manufacturer! All proprietary inks and formulas are very tightly controlled and there should be no way that those inks can find their way onto the open market.
Because of this, it is not hard for Hewlett-Packard to determine if the ink matches its own formula or not – a simple matter of reverse engineering the sample with chemical analysis.
So, why would Pelikan purchase genuine Hewlett-Packard cartridges and repackage them as its own?
Perhaps one answer might be that the company has been unable to obtain enough exhausted cartridges from the user base to fulfil demand for refilled/remanufactured product – leaving it short of product to ship from its own warehouses.
Effectively this is the opposite of counterfeiting – where genuine product is passed off as third party instead of third party product passed off as genuine.
H08 = HP28At the end of the day, this gives the original manufacturer (OEM) just as much of a problem as counterfeiting does in terms of loss of image and standing in the market. Instead of a poor quality counterfeit product making the OEM look bad, the OEM quality original product makes the third party look as good as the OEM when it shouldn’t, which in turn makes the OEM look only as good as the third party.
Specific products affected at this stage are Pelikan H06 and H08 cartridges, which are the HP 28 (C8728A) and HP 57 (C6657A) tri-colour cartridges.
