That will make the genuine chips even more expensive making it more lucrative to produce functional equivalents. The only way for FTDI to stop counterfeiting is to make their devices so cheap that counterfeiting is no longer viable.
race to the bottom ... not possible. FTDI is a small company that has heavily invested time and money in the driver base and chips them make.
they could drop price but then the chinese will drop price even more. every dodo in china has access to a chipfab in a shoddy garage that can spit out chips dirt cheap. Labor cost is next to nothing, they get the design for free from university students, and the government subsidizes these fabs heavily. so if you drop the price , they drop the price, you drop it more, they give em away at a price you can't even afford to pay the lady that comes and cleans the toilets in your office...
Doesn't work. you can't compete against china. The chinese can spin chips faster than the western world. That is why i left the chip business. it's over. last bluetooth chipset took 3 years to develop fully integrated apart from 2 caps and the antenna. some chines garage outfit made one in 3 months , half the power consumption , half the die size , antenna integrated , sells it for 1/4 of the price. give it up. it's over.
you can only make money if you create original new products that they can't copy (yet).
Look at the plethora of scopes. the bottom has completely fallen out of the scope market. ( good for hobbyists, bad for the big scope makers )
theres oodles of chinese kits that make, decent to very good basic digital scopes. they sell em at a low pricepoint. think about what it cost them to develop these. with the entire development budget for that scope you can probably hire 2 engineers over here... one will decide what color the case will be , the other will make a powerpoint presentation...
doesn't work.
all the commodity crap (diodes, transistors, ttl, cmos, lm741's , 8051's et al , is useless to pursue. Today, FTDI has become a commodity part... i predict soon we will see chinese AVR and Cortex 'clone' parts ... The only thing holding them back is the army of lawyers that ARM has and some specialised low power processes the chinese haven't mastered yet. but it is coming ...
TSMC and UMC and other chinese wafer fabs have more advanced processes than the western world. simply because they produce more and have more money to upgrade their gear. the fact is that big boys like TI , ST , Infineon are, today , already 2 steps later in technology than the big chinese fabs... only Intel and IBM can surpass them and IBM has recently thrown in the towel as well.
like is said : chips are a commodity. a diode made with 1 square millimeter of silicon is sold for 5 cents. a chip with 100.000 transistors that is also 1 square millimeter also costs 5 cents. it only costs more to design. this is untenable. due to the high development cost , but the fixed area-driven sales price it becomes prohibitive to design anything. budgets are being cut left and right. it's over, apart from the specialty devices the chinese haven't mastered yet.
The titanic has hit the iceberg , and the orchestra stopped playing 2 minutes ago, not because we are sinking , but because we are already completely underwater and on the way down... anyone still on board now is doomed. other ships, leaner ships ( not these huge behemoths that can't react and turn on a dime) are ready and already sailing. the traditional juggernaut of 'we design and fab it' is dead. lean design centers , huge megafabs with cheap labour. that is the current business model.