Godfrey Ikhemuemhe
8 December 2004
Opens service centers
Hewlet Packard, HP, the technology company, has reiterated its commitment to providing excellent service to its Nigerian customers with the opening of a service center in Lagos. The center is one of the three to be established around the country before the close of the first quarter of 2005. Maduka Emelife, Country manager for the company in Nigeria said that the establishment of the service center is in continuation of HP's determination to invest in the talents and resources available in the Nigerian IT market.
The Lagos service center is state-of-the-art. Customers can log service calls on a local service hotline linked directly into an international call center, at HP's expense.
The service center is fully stocked and is manned by a dedicated team of HP engineers to ensure that it is able to provide world-class and timely maintenance and warranty services for PCs, printers and peripherals.
The service center also provides Nigerians with gainful employment and an opportunity to train and expand their computing repair skills. To ensure that the company is able to deliver on its warranty and adequately support its products, it has embarked on a policy of adequately stocking its repair shops with large volumes of spare parts.
The company has also embarked on local ICT training to prepare adequate local resource for the maintenance of its products. In the past 30 months for instance, HP has succeeded in training over 500 technical professionals and IT engineers, providing them training, testing, and certification through its 30 seat IT training center.
The Minister for science and Technology, Prof Turner Isoun commended HP for its initiative to provide service centers in the country. He said that such initiative would assist the country in its efforts to develop ICT in the country. He further asserted that the centers would help the country in the development of human resource for the ICT sector in the country and provide gainful employment in this sector.
Meanwhile, Nigerian local authorities have succeeded in confiscating a considerable number of counterfeit printing supplies, which were manufactured in Europe and shipped to Nigeria via the Middle East to undermine the local printing supplies market. Among these goods were also many products to be sold as alleged HP products.
In the run-up to this event, which can be regarded as a clear warning for illegal manufacturers and dealers of counterfeit products, customs authorities, police and the manufacturer Hewlett-Packard (HP) had cooperated closely. Like other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the printing supplies business, HP has long since been increasing pressure on counterfeiters and perpetrators of product fraud. To effectively protect its customers from becoming harmed by counterfeit supplies, HP conducts dedicated activities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) within the scope of the HP anti-counterfeiting (ACF) programme EMEA.
Together with the ACF programme, HP personnel in Nigeria is also active on a large scale. "We are eager to support the local authorities in their fight against counterfeit printing supplies and product fraud in Nigeria. The ACF programme will do anything possible to make sure that customers get what they pay for: the premium print quality and high reliability which they have come to expect from HP originals," says an HP spokesperson.
Recently, the local HP team had organised special training for the local authorities on how to spot suspicious shipments of alleged original HP printing supplies within the framework of an educational offensive for harbour and customs staff of the Lagos Harbour, one of the world's largest sea ports.
To supplement these activities, HP is focused on informing Nigerian HP customers on the risks of unwittingly using counterfeit printing products by distributing information material and offering support. "Our customers' feedback shows that this strategy proves effective, and we have also observed that they increasingly contact us in order not to blunder into the illegal scheming of defrauders," summarises an HP spokesperson.
Worldwide, the supply of counterfeit brand name products and consumer goods has increased significantly, also affecting the printing supplies business. According to official estimations, counterfeit products meanwhile cause profit losses to OEMs amounting to more than EUR 500 billion annually worldwide and also account for the loss of hundreds and thousands of jobs in the EMEA region. Many of these counterfeit goods originate from Asia and increasingly from Eastern Europe. However, manufacturing and distribution are ultimately a worldwide phenomenon which also affects the Nigerian market as the recent case proves.
To effectively fight counterfeiting of printing supplies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the HP ACF programme has processed approximately 1,500 leads to date which were provided by HP staff, business partners and end users all over the region, notifying HP of suspected cases of counterfeiting and product fraud. Substantive leads are followed up by a network of anti-fraud consultants and a global law-firm who also collect further evidence to review and build up cases against unauthorised dealers and perpetrators of fraudulent marketing.
These proceedings meanwhile led to more than 800 investigations and 200 legal actions with the direct consequence that hundreds of thousands of counterfeit products were already withdrawn from circulation throughout the EMEA region. "As an indirect consequence, ACF activities in EMEA countries often provide useful information on dealers of counterfeit print cartridges for the local authorities, in other regions and also vice versa. This cooperation is important for the overall success of the ACF programme and grants that we can best protect our customers, " explains a spokesperson of the ACF programme EMEA.
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