Some clients want to establish a company in China with a very unique or attractive name designed to attract customers’ attention. This practice has been viable in the past, but going forward this approach might encounter some problems.
In general, the name of a company should be decent and formal. As China lawyers, a common practice we see is companies named after the founder, such as “Ford” or “Boeing”. These names are often easily transliterated it into Chinese as the trade name of a new China company. We also often suggest our clients integrate key words of its main business or industry into the name of their China company, in fact this is a requirement under Chinese regulations.
However, company names such as “Beijing is afraid of his wife Technology Co., Ltd.”, “Guangxi Nanning King and His Friends Trading Co., Ltd.” and a company named as “Baoji has a group of youths who bear dreams and believe that life may be created under the leadership of Uncle Niu Magic Network Technology Co., Ltd.” and other weird company names incredibly registered well before local AICs have gained notoriety.
In order to strengthen the supervision on registration of company name, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce ahs issued its rules for prohibiting and restricting use of certain strange enterprise names. According to such rules, overly long and bizarre names will be prevented from being approved by local AICs. The rules also prohibit the registration of names which refer to terrorism and extremism, as well as those that attempted to copy the names of any existing enterprises.
The rules are very detailed in regulating and restricting the order, format and composition of the enterprise name which would not be easily understood by a foreign investor. A big problem for foreign investors is that the Chinese name of the new company may become weird after being simply translated from English. For those foreign investors who have doubt or are hesitate in making any decision on the names of their new China company, China lawyers may be of assistance in clarifying any terms in such rules and making the key words translated properly and fit for registration.