The Middle East is a growing market for adidas products. What are the main brand protection challenges you face there?

First of all, quite a significant extent of counterfeiting. Surprisingly so given that, for a long time, our business had not thought about developing those markets. Secondly, authorities lack experience of anti-counterfeiting work. I have done work in various countries but there are not well-trodden paths so there is a job of building relationships and working out how things work.

There is in some countries a slight unwillingness to cooperate. In some countries we are just told: "Well the relevant ministry that currently accepts complaints for counterfeiting is closed. We are not accepting complaints at the moment." We don't really know what that means. In one country we were told that there is no lawyer who has any knowledge of how to do brand protection work and so we don't do it. Probably nobody in that country does.

Another problem is a legal system that does not have experience of the problem and is not attuned or sympathetic to it. There can be excessively cumbersome evidential requirements in cases. For instance there is a very strong expectation in some countries that if a product is fake there will be a matching genuine product so the authority can find a sample of the genuine product, put it by the fake and be able to see straight away the reason why it's fake. But of course, counterfeiters, while they copy, don't copy all of our design. So you could well have a shoe or a piece of apparel which may use a trade mark but is not a copy of our design. That is where it becomes complicated.

How do you try to raise awareness among vendors in the Middle East about the dangers of selling counterfeit products?

We don't work on counterfeit sellers per se. We aim to enforce by raids, seizure and penalties to the maximum extent likely to be effective and when we raid we aim to provide maximum publicity. Because counterfeit raids are not very common in these countries they do attract a fair amount of interest, so we very often get into well-distributed newspapers. We also do information campaigns where we might create leaflets which say that adidas trade marks are protected and that it's illegal to sell products which are not genuine adidas products with these trade marks. Then we will do a raid and distribute more of these leaflets to communicate the message that this is an illegal activity.

In developed markets in the US and Europe you will have trade mark owner organisations that will do a degree of lobbying and PR about the dangers and consumer concerns around counterfeits. But I don't think the Middle East markets are sufficiently developed for that to be possible.

If there are brand owner organisations in any of the countries we are not aware of them. Even within the sports industry there is only a limited amount that other brands do. We have very occasionally cooperated with Nike, for example. But generally speaking these are small markets and so many brands do not enforce their rights.