Apple is getting ready to finally sell the new iPad in China after paying the struggling display manufacturer Proview $60 million to settle a two-year long trademark dispute over the device’s name. Proview registered the trademark back in 2000 when it had plans to manufacture a web-ready handheld device but never followed through. They held on to the rights regardless, and when Apple started selling iPads in China, they took legal action. The full story is a little bit shady though.A few years ago, Apple set up a company called IP Application Development to buy up any and all trademarks it might need to expand globally. They purchased the rights to “iPad” from a Proview affiliate in Taiwan for just £35,000 and must have assumed that their purchase also included mainland China. But in 2009 when Apple started selling the iPad with great success in mainland China, Proview’s Shenzen affiliate raised a red flag and argued that they still owned the trademark. They pursued the claim aggressively, and last December, a court in Shenzhen ruled that Apple indeed did not own the trademark. A couple of months later, authorities started pulling iPads off of shelves at Proview’s request.Now that Apple’s written a big check and cleared up the confusion, the company is free to sell iPads again. This is good news for Apple since China is their second largest market, after the United States. Proview’s future doesn’t look quite as bright. The company’s chairman Yang Rongshan says that Proview is currently in about $400 million of debt, and all of Apple’s $60 million will go towards paying that back. For Apple, that’s only a drop in the bucket. $60 million is roughly 0.5 percent of the company’s annual revenues in China.
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