South Africa: RS South Africa warns of the growing sophistication of industrial counterfeiting

RS Group plc, listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: RS1), posted revenue of 2.881 billion British pounds for the financial year ended March 31, 2026, with a catalogue of 875,000 industrial products in stock and over 5 million part numbers, sourced from 2,500 suppliers across 33 markets. In an op-ed published on August 17, 2026 via APO Group, Viv Muthan, Head of Export Sales and Operations at RS South Africa, a subsidiary of the group, warns against the growing sophistication of industrial parts counterfeiting, exemplified by bearings, one of the most massively copied products in industry. Counterfeiters subsequently copied these standards, used optical character recognition to refine the appearance of their products and invested in large-scale replica manufacturing, to the point where an OEM ended up buying out the production capacity of a counterfeit factory to launch, after standardization, the production of some of its high-volume references. Faced with this drift, Muthan proposes the concept of a "supply blockchain of trust": an unalterable record of every transaction, inspection and movement of a product, from the manufacturer to the point of installation, making it possible to verify provenance without relying solely on the supplier's reputation.