22 January 2024 14:51 22 January 2024 14:51 | Share
The authorities plan to launch an experiment on marking electronics and printed circuit boards in the first quarter of 2024. They want to start marking laptops, tablets, and smartphones in February. Later, monoblocks and monitors will be added to this list. The marking will not allow Chinese equipment to be transported to Russia under the guise of being domestic. However, the measure is fraught with additional costs that will fall on producers. not everyone supports the idea and believes that labeling will affect the price of the final product.
Marking of final products
As CNews has learned, the Ministry of Industry and Trade plans to conduct an experiment on labeling laptops, smartphones, tablets and printed circuit boards in the first quarter of 2024. CNews was told about this by two interlocutors among electronics manufacturers who attended a meeting at the ministry on January 19, 2024.
The experiment is planned to be carried out from February 29, 2024 to April 30, 2025. A draft Government resolution on conducting an experiment on marking electronics and circuit boards has already been developed. And it will soon be published on regulation.gov.ru.
It is planned to mark the final product and the board itself. Then they want to connect monoblocks and monitors to the experiment. Participation in it is voluntary. Representatives of Aquarius, Yadro, and R-fon did not respond to a request about plans to participate in the experiment.
CNews expects details about the experiment from representatives of the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
They won’t bring Chinese anymore
According to a CNews source, the marking will not allow domestic companies to import Chinese laptops, smartphones and tablets under the guise of Russian registered electronics.
The authorities are again planning to launch an experiment on marking electronics and circuit boards
The marking will apply to all products in circulation in the country and will solve several problems at once, a Fplus representative told CNews. “From an import point of view, it will help fight “gray” supplies and counterfeit goods. From the point of view of real import substitution, it is to prevent fraudulent schemes in government procurement of domestic equipment (when foreign equipment is actually supplied under the guise of products manufactured in Russia),” he noted.
According to him, the marking system involves additional costs for manufacturers and importers, associated primarily with the purchase and operation of marking equipment, but also with the application of control and identification marks.
The electronics manufacturer Beshtau Group insisted on marking printed circuit boards, Oleg Osipov, general director of Beshtau Electronics, told CNews. According to him, Beshtau will mark printed circuit boards and lithium-ion batteries for laptops.
According to Osipov, marking electronics and circuit boards will significantly reduce “gray” supplies to Russia and make the market more transparent. Beshtau expects that the experiment will soon include other electronics, including PCs, monitors, etc.
The topic of participation in a pilot project for labeling a number of computer equipment products is not new for Russian manufacturers. “The important point now is that in addition to the final product, boards will be subject to marking, and this brings us closer to the implementation of the idea of marking, which will allow us to monitor the compliance of the elements of the production cycle with those declared when receiving the status of domestic,” the general director of the ANO Consortium “Computer Technology” told CNews » Svetlana Legostaeva.
Against labeling
But not everyone supports the idea of labeling. “The initiative for possible labeling of smartphones and laptops does not guarantee protection against an inflated share of localization in products supplied under government contracts, and moreover, it carries additional risks and costs for players in the consumer segment (costs for the purchase of equipment, personnel, IT improvements, etc.) and will accordingly affect the increase in prices on the shelf, which is contrary to the program for popularizing domestic products,” one of the electronics market participants told CNews. According to him, there are no counterfeits in the categories of smartphones and laptops, but there is a problem with illegal supplies. “Labelling will not solve this problem, as the situation in other consumer goods segments demonstrates,” he noted.
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Digitization
A representative of CRPT (the operator of the state marking system “Honest Sign”, where an experiment on marking radio electronics is taking place) told CNews that the system is ready for the experiment.
“If laptops, phones and other goods are included in the experiment, this will not affect their cost,” he clarifies. — Business participation in the experiment is voluntary and free of charge – all expenses are borne by the labeling operator. The labeling will also not affect the final cost of the equipment; its contribution to the cost is unnoticeable even in cheap goods up to 50 rubles; in expensive equipment it will amount to hundredths or thousandths of a percent. At the same time, we don’t see any difficulties in labeling laptops and phones: production speeds here are low, packaging is standard.”
Another CNews interlocutor, who was present at the meeting with the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said that at the meeting, manufacturers and distributors expressed their readiness to label equipment and supported the project. However, M.Video proposed to label only those products that are supplied under government contracts, but manufacturers and distributors reacted negatively to this, pointing out that it is impossible to separate and label them separately.
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Digitization
“We consider this idea negative for the market,” Anton Guskov, a representative of RATEK (including M-Video, Citylink, Huawei, Samsung, etc.), told CNews. “Labelling can be introduced in any segment in order to combat counterfeits and illegal goods, but in the category of laptops and smartphones there are no such problems.”
“If the goal is to provide certain goods for government purchases, then the requirements should be established only for government purchases and not affect the consumer market,” he continued. “In general, this initiative may increase the burden on product costs, which in turn may have a negative impact on retail prices.”
They have already tried to introduce markings
The idea to introduce labeling for electronics became known in August 2021. The Ministry of Industry and Trade planned to launch an experiment on labeling electronic products in March 2022. Then they also planned to label mobile phones, laptops, tablets, e-books, video cameras, and printed circuit boards.
But in the end, the ministry decided to conduct an experiment on a narrow list of goods: lamps, LEDs, transformers and semiconductor devices.
Kristina Holupova
2024-01-22 14:34:43
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