Recently, Liu Shen, on behalf of a world-renowned medical device enterprise, successfully conducted an investigation and secured administrative penalties in a case involving the unauthorized parallel import of medical devices.
Parallel import has long been a challenging issue in legal practice. Under the Trademark Law and prevailing trademark practice, even if sellers import genuine products from foreign brand owners for resale without formal authorization, such conduct is generally deemed falling under the trademark right exhaustion principle rather than trademark infringement. As a result, it is difficult to impose sanctions merely on the grounds of trademark infringement.
Through thorough and in-depth investigation, the Liu Shen team identified that the seller peeled off the original English labels of imported genuine medical devices and replaced them with counterfeit Chinese labels. The original labels bore authentic information such as product serial numbers and production dates, while the newly affixed fake Chinese labels contained inconsistent and falsified information. The act of removing and replacing labels was essentially an unauthorized alteration of the products’ production dates.
Taking this as the key breakthrough point, Liu Shen filed an application for administrative investigation and penalty with the local Administration for Market Regulation where the seller is located. Following multiple rounds of professional communication, the team persuaded the authority to take law enforcement action, which caught the seller red-handed in the act of unauthorized label replacement on site. Pursuant to Article 39 of the Regulations on the Supervision and Administration of Medical Devices and other relevant provisions, the market regulation authority confirmed the seller’s illegal acts, ordered it to cease violations, and imposed a fine.
The case was handled by the Liu Shen legal team comprising lawyers YUAN Yuan, ZHENG Peng and ZHAO Jingjing. The team conducted in-depth case analysis and detailed factual investigation. Faced with the difficulty of establishing trademark infringement, the team tactically shifted legal approaches, keenly identified the seller’s other administrative illegal acts, and took such violations as the breakthrough to secure administrative sanctions. The firm effectively cracked down on the illegal conduct and received high recognition from the client. This case also provides valuable legal thinking and practical operational guidelines for the industry on investigating and penalizing illegal acts associated with parallel imports of medical devices.
