Print

Mail

wiki links

World Business Quick Take

■ IPR
Chinese court bites Apple
Apple has lost a court appeal against a decision that rejected its application to have its trademark logo extended to cover clothing and other items in China, state media reported yesterday. The verdict by the Beijing No.1 Inter-mediate People's Court means that Apple cannot claim that its logo is protected under law for those goods, Xinhua news agency said. Xinhua said the trademark appraisal com-mittee of China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) had previously rejected Apple's application from April 2000 to have its trademark logo extended to cover clothing, hats and shoes. Guangdong Apples Industrial Co, a maker of leather goods, had registered a similar trade-mark with an entire apple. Apple Computer's trade-mark has an apple with a bite taken out of it. The report said the SAIC, in its original decision, had concluded the two trade-marks were similar but not the same.

■ Electronics
Phones fuel LG Electronics
LG Electronics Inc, South Korea's second-largest electronics maker, said revenue last month rose 34 percent from a year ago after mobile-phone sales nearly doubled. Total sales rose to 2.1 trillion won (US$1.8 billion), compared with 1.5 trillion won a year earlier, the Seoul-based company said in a regula-tory filing to the Korea Stock Exchange. Sales rose 7.2 percent from April, the company said. Revenue from telecommunications rose 87 percent to 715.2 billion won, after mobile phone sales jumped 98 percent to 3.2 million units. Sales of TV and digital displays rose 18 percent to 739.6 billion won, while sales of refrigerators and other appliances rose 17 percent to 606 billion won, the statement said.

■ Internet
Yahoo gets Chinese portal
Yahoo Inc, launched a new Internet search portal that allows users to look for Web sites using Chinese or Eng-lish keywords, aiming to attract a larger share of China's 80 million Internet users to its services. Yahoo's portal, www.yisou.com, uses technology developed by the company to allow users to find Web sites by using keywords instead of having to know entire Internet addresses. Yahoo owns the second most-used Internet search engine behind Google Inc. "By combining the best assets of our proprietary Yahoo search technology with our expertise and knowledge of the Chinese online space, we created a dedicated search destination custom-ized for the Chinese user,"Yahoo China general manager Zhou Hongyi said in a statement.

■ Entertainment
EMI, Warner in talks
British music giant EMI and Warner Music Group (WMG) are to reopen merger talks as the EU readies to clear a tie-up between two of their major rivals, a British newspaper said yesterday, quoting sources close to the companies. "The road is now open for EMI and Warner to merge," a source familiar with WMG told The Times, after it emerged last week that a joint music venture linking Japanese group Sony and Bertels-mann of Germany was likely to be cleared without conditions. Time Warner sold its music division to a consortium led by Canadian media mogul Edgar Bronfman for US$2.6 billion last November, shortly after EMI conceded defeat in its fight for the recorded music arm of the business.

This story has been viewed 1654 times.