Counterfeit bearings have flooded the lucrative domestic market, affecting productivity mainly of industrial and agricultural sectors, two major bearing consuming sectors.

Presently 90 percent of the bearings used in different mechanical and semi-mechanical devices are fake as a section of businessmen prefers to sell and distribute substandard bearings as it is more profitable than selling original bearings, said the importers and salesmen at Nayabazar, the largest bearing market of the country.

"If profit by selling an original bearing is Tk 20, the amount is Tk 400 for a duplicate bearing, which prompts many traders to take unfair means," said Noor Mohammad, who has been selling bearings at Nayabazar for the last 35 years.

He said as it is difficult to differentiate an original bearing from a fake one, a section of importers and wholesalers misuses the opportunity, ultimately affecting the end users.

Although the business activities of bearings are not much visible, the monthly turnover of the sub-sector is worth around Tk 200 crore, sector people said.

Mizanur Rahman, general manager (Operation) of Rangpur Foundry Ltd (RFL), said: "RFL distributes bearings with its own brand name across the country, but once we found that some unknown unscrupulous people were flooding the market with duplicate bearings using our brand name."

This prompted RFL management to make special bearing packages with security hologram to prevent misuse of the company's brand name, said the company official. "But the counterfeiting has already tainted the image of RFL to some extent," he added.

The country's import-dependent bearing market brings the item mainly from China, Poland, the UK, Japan, Germany and Hungary, according to the sector people.

Japanese NTN and NSK, and the UK-made SKF are the most popular and reliable bearing brands in Bangladesh.

But these bearings are much costlier compared to duplicate China-made bearings.

"If an NTN brand bearing costs Tk 3,000, a China-made fake one will cost not more than Tk 300," said Musa Bhuiyan, owner of Janata Machineries, a bearing importer and distributor.

Describing the reason for the high demand for substandard bearings, he said: "Customers always prefer low-cost product. So when I hardly can sell an NTN brand bearing at Tk 2,000, some other traders sell it at Tk 1,500 because their product is duplicate. Customers buy the low-cost product without knowing the fact."

The business houses that sell original bearings are suffering a lot for the malpractice as it has reduced sales of those shops significantly.

"As the honest businessmen suffer a lot for the malpractice, once we initiated a move to float a platform styled Bangladesh Bearing Merchants Association to tackle the situation, but the association failed to work for unknown reasons," said Bhuiyan.

About the methods of counterfeiting bearings, the sector people said some importers buy low quality bearings from China and inscribe popular brand names on those through laser writing, while some traders import well-packaged duplicate bearings from China and Dubai.

Productivity of factories, garment and agricultural sectors gets interrupted due to the use of duplicate bearings, they said.

When a bearing goes out of order, it takes two to three hours to replace it with a new one, and at the same time it also wastes power, energy and money, said the RFL official.

"Consumption of bearing in the country has also increased as the fake bearings don't last long," an official of Brothers Corporation at Nayabazar said, suggesting that the government should monitor the import of counterfeit and original bearings.

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