Manufacturing Equipment
Eastman Machine Company, based in Buffalo, New York, was established in 1892 by a Canadian inventor, George Eastman, who invented the first electric fabric-cutting machine. Eastman’s invention revolutionized the clothing manufacturing business in 1892 when it came up with its first cutting invention because the industry until then had only one means — manual labor — to cut fabrics. The company has many patents and today sells more than 100 manual and automated cutting machine products worldwide. Since 1898, Eastman Machine has been owned by the Stevenson family, whose ancestor, Charles Stevenson, was one of the original investors in the company.
Eastman Machine discovered its first clone of its technologies in the 1990s, when it found a Chinese-manufactured copy of one of its most popular products, a manually operated electric-powered cloth cutting machine that has been a mainstay of its business for 50 years. As in the counterfeit Accuride product mentioned above, the cloned Eastman product used the same design, model number and color as the original Eastman device. The only difference, a not-so-subtle one, was that the Chinese manufacturer had changed the machine’s name from “Eastman” to “Westman.”
In testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means in April 2005, Eastman’s CEO, Robert Stevenson, described the devastating effects the counterfeit machines from China are having on his company. “Over the last ten years, we went from a company that employed 150 union workers and sold 20,000 straight knife machines worldwide, to a company that now employs only 58 union workers and sells fewer than 8,000 of these machines. Today, we are almost a non-player on Mainland China, where 75 percent of the world’s cutting machines are to be found and over 100,000 pirated Eastman-clones are sold annually,” he testified.
Stevenson said in his remarks to the committee that as his company has watched the sales of its manual machines plummet it invested millions of dollars in research to create new, automated and computerized cutting technologies that have, once again, revolutionized the cutting process in manufacturing facilities. Yet he fears that its new techniques are vulnerable as well. “We are truly afraid that our research and development efforts — all the hard work and effort to bring these machines to market — will shortly be pirated as well as we start to sell these machines in the Chinese market”.
