The Recycler Issue 316

FEATURE
Ian Copsey agreed, saying he was in
favour of the OEM’s action. “To be
honest, I welcome it. I think the
remanufacturing industry is trying to
provide a legitimate service and supply
choice for customers, and absolutely I
welcome the OEM activity on patents
and IP, that is really forcing the mostly
new-build material to really think
about what they release.”
“At the distribution level, people are
nervous about being on that radar,
they’ve seen some of the activity that
Canon, and HP, and Epson, have taken,
and I hope that plays on the mind
of those company owners and
stakeholders.”
“From our point of view,” Copsey
continued, “everything we develop is
compliant with IP, but clearly there’s a
lot of product that’s flooded into the
market in the last few years that hasn’t
been, so the fact the OEM is
challenging that more and more can
only be a good thing, both for us and
for the industry.”
“I think it’s really good,” agreed
Armor’s Gerwald van der Gijp, “I think
the OEMs need to react. I’m not
convinced they still really understand
how the aftermarket is really working,
but all the actions they’re taking, I
think is good.”
“I think they should really focus on
the Chinese new-build products,
and be more flexible with the
remanufacturing industry,” he added.
KMP’s Jan-Michael Sieg was another
to defend the OEMs’ conduct in the last
twelve months, observing that “those
who take the effort to create or design
something have the undeniable right
to protect their intellectual property,
and this should be respected by
everyone.”
Peter Cowan, meanwhile, was fairly
ambivalent, calling the constant legal
pressure “exactly what I would do in
their position”; he explained that Data
Direct had a different concern,
however, with the OEMs’ ongoing
advances in chip technology posing
more of a potential challenge.
“Twenty years ago, the only thing
you worried about chips was, what
kind of chips we were going to get with
our steak,” Cowan explained. “But
now, OEMs just rule the roost with
making more and more complicated
chips. They get in the way of
remanufactured products and
compatible products, they rule the
roost by just making more and more
complex chips, and I think that’s the
biggest element of challenge to many
sides of our business.”
“Making a good toner powder,
making a good drum unit, etcetera, is
much, much less of a challenge, it is
the complexity of the chips that’s the
difficulty.”
Cindy Zhang of Apex also called the
OEMs’ chip technology “a really big
hurdle to break through,” explaining
that the time spent working on a new
chip had stretched from six months to
one-two years. However, she added
that developments such as the spate of
lawsuits in 2018 was “normal,” and a
sign of the OEMs “just trying to protect
their customers.”
“They are fighting for their business
– it has always been the same,”
reflected a pragmatic Alfred Wirch.
“They need to fight for their business.
They will make life hard for us – they
always have done, they always will do.
Sometimes it’s a disaster, like with the
firmware updates, but what comes
next, I don’t know.”
As ever, the threat of a race to the
bottom in terms of prices was also a
recurrent concern for many in Hall
5.1. Van der Gijp observed that
“Amazon having fifty different brands
on their platform, which are not WEEE
compliant, ROHS compliant or REACH
compliant, and which don’t pay VAT,”
are still very visible to many
THE RECYCLER • ISSUE 316 • MARCH 2019
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