IP protection plays a very important role in China and in the plastic injection moulding or contract manufacturing business. Logically, IP is a very important issue for us at MGC. If we do not protect your IP, our reason for existence disappears.
When you want to do business in China regarding contract manufacturing, it is highly advised to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with your business partner. Do not sign an NDA in which the potential violator has to come to court in your home country, the chance that he or she will never turn up is very present. Always verify with which company you sign the NDA and if the person is authorized to sign an NDA, also trademark your brand in China, even if there are no plans to sell the product in China. If any funny business comes along with a partner or a sub-contractor, it can be very useful to own the tooling outright as well.
Please note, the latter paragraph is general practice. When you go in business with MGC, you sign an NDA with us and we will take care of the other partners and subcontractors.
To keep our client at a peace of mind concerning the safeguarding of their IP and ideas, we apply several internal company policies to be able to tackle virtually every IP infringement issue before they could exist.
We always sign a double NDA with our clients; one from our holding in Hong Kong, which runs all our export business, and one from our Chinese company, which controls the production. We enforce other NDA�s or legal documents with our local partners as well, this depends on the legal or intellectual complexity of the relevant product.
In this model we split up the production into different sub-assemblies. When we retrieve the sub-assemblies in our factory, we perform the final assembly and packing. Due to the SSP we create two main advantages: Because we split a complex product up into different simple sub-assemblies, we are able to source locally for good prices. The secured in-house final assembly minimizes the risk of IP infringement.
Through our always up-to-date IT system and our visits at our subcontractors on a regular basis, we have a strict control on our subcontractors. After a production run, key components and or/ moulds are transported back to our facility.
If sensitive software is supplied by our clients, we use dummy software for testing and QC purposes. The genuine version is uploaded at the end of the process by key staff, or even back in the home country of our client.
For file storage we use a secured database, which is only accessible by certain staff members during the project.
In general, we at MGC know the value of IP. Thanks to our years of experience and know-how in the business, and the several internal processes, we rarely experience any problems regarding IP infringement of any kind.