I've tried to stick to the facts in the below so people can form their own opinion, additionally I've tried to be clear which are facts, which are deductions, and which are speculation. If there are any factual errors, or further information, I'd love to hear about them so I can update the below to be as accurate as possible.

tl;dr "Flicon" (or any of the other names they use) does not exist as an incorporated entity in Lithuania. It is entirely unclear which company actually produces these goods, or where, and they seem to want to keep it that way.

Preamble

Disclaimer: I have no association with any flight peripheral manufacturer other than as a customer.

Note 1: all of this is publicly available information, I've not (yet) done any effort to dig deeper than search engines allow.

Note 2: Flicon has appeared under many names in the past years, unless relevant I will refer to them simply as "Flicon".

Note 3: I'll be comparing mostly against Virpil , the reason for this is they're supposedly both Lithuanian corporations. So incorporation forms etc. should be more easily comparable than for non Lithuanian companies.

Note 4: https://rekvizitai.vz.lt does not appear to be an official government website, but rather one re-publishing publicly available information. The government website (https://www.registrucentras.lt) is not as userfriendly and has a query limit, but from my searching leads to the same results (but in Lithuanian), so I'll be using the former.

Legal entity

Flicon's legal policies mention no incorporated entities, which is rather unusual. For example Virpil's Privacy Policy is in the name of "UAB Virpil" (with "UAB" being the form of incorporation), Flicon's only mentions "Flicontech". The same goes for their other policies. I am not a lawyer but for any of these to have any legal effect I'd expect them to be written in the name of a legal entity (just look up UPS' Privacy Policy for comparison)

There are public databases of incorporations in most (if not all) of the EU countries, for example this is Virpil's entry. This is especially convenient because Flicon is supposedly also located in Lithuania.
Unfortunately Flicon doesn't appear in the database under any of the names I'm aware they've used. There are no "Flicon", "Flicontech", "FC Technologies", nor "FC Tech" incorporated in Lithuania as far as I could find.
I would like to add to this that having to "guess" the legal entity of a company is already highly unusual, it's generally pretty front and center.

The only actually existing company directly mentioned on their website that may be them (for lack of other legal entities being mentioned) is MP Amber Art (see their corporate details ), a single person corporation whose address lies inside what is clearly a residential block, see Google Maps/Earth ).
My initial understanding was that this was just the firm that designed the website, but when looking at their corporate records (see link above) they're listed as "EVRK v.2 industry", which appears to be a category for remote retail sale over phone or internet (this is the same one Virpil uses). I'm not a specialist in Lithuanian corporate structures, so maybe this could also be used for webdesign firms, but it seems pretty specific.

Address

Their supposed address houses a couple of companies, none of them Flicon, nor MP Amber Art for that matter (see whose located at that address here ). Personally I would consider the most likely candidate to be "Ingstad & Co UAB" (see their website and their corporate details, an air freight company, but it could be one of the others, of course. This would explain why they explcitly don't want you sending returns back to "their" address (from the return policy: "Please do not send your purchase back to the manufacturer.") as it is not actually Flicon's address.

Made in EU

Their products seem to be labelled "Made in EU", which, as far as I could find, is not legally protected (see WikiPedia), and thus as far as I am aware provides no guarantees that whatever has that label is, in fact, made in the EU (I've heard claimed differently, but no-one was able to give me any sources for those claims).

EU companies would usually state the actual country of manufacture (eg. "Made in Germany"), because those country of origin statements are legally protected (to varying degrees). For example Virpil's items generally mention either "Made in Belarus", or "Made in Lithuania" depending on whether they're made at their old, or new, location.

EU domain name

Interestingly Flicon used to host their website at "flicon.eu" but seemingly lost, or at least stopped using, that domain. It still appears to be registered to a Lithuanian ISP though. This is pure speculation on my end, but the requirements for a EU domain are as far as I understand to be either a EU citizen, or a EU corporation (there are some exceptions for countries "close" to the EU, but I digress), assuming they are neither that may be why they lost the domain and resorted to using a US registrar (GoDaddy) and a domain (".com") that has no such requirements. The information on that domain is all hidden, so again no real way to find out which corporate entity is actually behind things.

That last bit may be another potential reason for switching domains to the US as European DNS registrars sometimes provide some contact information for the holder of a domain, which they may not have wanted to provide.
Eg. it is possible to find the email address of the person currently holding "flicon.eu" which points to a company selling sewing materials ("MP Baltic, UAB"), which seems like a potentially defunct company based on their financials(?) and the only employee being the CEO. Bit weird of them to have (probably) taken over the flicon.eu domain about a year ago (last major change to DNS was a year ago, per a site that sells historical DNS data), but really not sure what to make of it otherwise.

Edit
Pub: 04 Feb 2024 22:13 UTC
Edit: 04 Feb 2024 22:22 UTC
Views: 260