The issue that will always be centre stage in the FTA is probably agriculture, because in all of these countries you have the need for stability in the countryside. It’s very, very sensitive for politicians to ask any of these countries to tell a poor farmer that he’ll have to compete with a rice grower in Guangdong province or something like that. But certainly IP should be more at centre stage than it has been in the past.

 

By and large, IP is something that U.S. and Euro-zone companies probably think about more just because they have invested a lot into their brands, probably with the exception of Japan and Korea. Indian brands and Chinese brands, Southeast Asian brands, they’re just emerging brands. They’re not necessarily globally recognised, although that is slowly changing.

 

The interesting thing about the [Asean-China] free trade agreement is that there might be a kind of paradigm shift, where now you have Chinese brands, in particular, that are becoming more popular, and with the free trade agreement, there’s going to be more of them being sold into Asean countries. So the paradigm shift that I possibly see is that now it’s the case of Chinese companies pressuring the Chinese government to pressure foreign governments to protect their IP rights outside of China. In the past, it’s been the U.S. that’s led that argument and put the pressure on China and Asian countries on IP rights.

 

I think so. It looks like there’s going to be 9,000 different types of duty-free products [under the Asean-China free trade agreement], so that’s a huge, very broad range of products. When we deal with counterfeit cases, almost anything can be counterfeited. It can be anything from a garment to a food product to something that is very sophisticated. And if you have the possibility that some of those products will be counterfeited, that means that Asian countries themselves are really going to need to focus on IP issue. So it’s no longer just the U.S. and European countries that need to be concerned with it.

 

No, I think this will be trend that you will see over a period of time . . . But certainly I think with the new free trade agreement, increasingly China and India [and the rest of Asia] will be considering the local Asian marketplace as a big marketplace for them, whereas in the past they’re very much export-oriented towards the Euro-zone and the U.S. What’s happening is that Asia is realising that over the next 5, 10, 20 years, there might be a de-linkage [with the West]. Increasingly the local regional market will be more important.

 

Different countries tend to approach IP very differently. Let’s take, for example, Japan protecting their IP in China. The Japanese industries tend to come together and form a kind of coalition. It’s done for a lot of reasons but I think primarily to decrease the cost of the investigation. So basically all of the Japanese auto companies, for example, will come together to form a kind of consortium, and they will set the market price for intellectual property investigations in the automobile industry.