Using the same "About" section on every page? Duplicate content?

I've noticed some of my competitors are using a text snippet on every page of their site. The text is basically an about section that describes the site while using some niche keywords. Overall the pages are a low volume of content (A few hundred words max) but they use the same "about" snippet on every page (a couple hundred words). I imagine they are doing this to boost word count while including some keywords.

Would this be an issue for duplicate content? Would it be beneficial for SEO due to extra keywords or are they just doing this for purely word count?
Thanks!

I don't think it's really beneficial in any way.

Even if it's just for the word count, this text could be far from the main content of the page by meaning.

KONODIODA said:

Even if it's just for the word count, this text could be far from the main content of the page by meaning.

Click to expand...

The text wouldn't be too far from the meaning. The text would always be kinda related.

I don't think this would be an issue in any kind of ways,
most of the websites have some text in the footer/sidebar

don't expect wonders from such a thing,
but it could beneficial to help google to know the actual niche of your website

duplicate content doesn't actually harm you. It just prevents you to rank high / get indexed if all you have is literally duplicate content.

From my experience at least.