In China Factories Are Exporting Lower Prices Around the World, Bloomberg News wrote this week about something our internmational manufacturing lawyers have been seeing: Desperate Chinese factories are lowering their prices. Are all Chinese factories desperate? Absolutely not. Are all Chinese factories lowering their prices? Near as we can tell, a great many are, especially
You Need an NNN Agreement for China IP Protection Relying on a standard Western-style NDA to protect your IP from China sets you up for IP theft because NDAs have critical limitations that render them ineffective for China. You need an NNN agreement tailored specifically for China. This post explains what an NNN agreement is,
Looking to do business with a Chinese company? About to send a Chinese company some money? Want to know whether that Chinese company is worthy of your business and your trust? How do you do get information on a Chinese company when certain private investigatory work in China is illegal? Our clients often ask us to
1. Western Companies Want to Leave China and Are Leaving China The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article last week on American companies seeking to reduce their exposure to China. This article, Trade Deal Alone Won’t Fix Strained U.S.-China Business Relations, reinforces what we have been saying for months about how American and
File for Your China Trademark in China, not Madrid Whenever clients ask about China trademark registration through the Madrid System, my advice is pretty straightforward: filing directly with the Chinese Trademark Office (CTMO) is almost always the smarter choice. China’s Trademark System China’s trademark system is a bit of a maze—complex, idiosyncratic, and highly regimented.
An article titled, Kickstarter Prototype to Production: $100K is not Enough, is getting a lot of play on Linkedin among the China manufacturing crowd, with those I know who know China manufacturing agreeing with it. The article provides compelling reasons why getting an electronics product manufactured in China will nearly always require more than $100,000.
The purpose of a trademark, from both a legal and branding perspective, is to identify the source of goods. It follows, therefore, that the best trademarks are both memorable and distinctive. You want people to associate your brand with your company, not confuse your brand with other brands. You also want to make sure your
Not surprisingly, our China lawyers are seeing a massive increase in foreign companies seeking to reduce or eliminate their China ties. Many are seeking to terminate their relationship with their Chinese suppliers and move production elsewhere (so far, it’s been mostly to Vietnam, Taiwan, Poland, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, India and Malaysia). The other day I
Everything China comes in waves and China trademark “theft” is no different. When we first started this blog back in 2006, we would get a call just about every week from someone wanting to sue a Chinese company blocking the company’s product from leaving China. We hated those calls because most of the time our
Our China trademark lawyers are often asked about the difference between the Nice Classification system for trademarks and China’s trademark subclass system. They are related, but quite different. The Nice Classification system is an international classification of goods and services that separates all possible goods and services into 45 classes: 34 classes for goods and
