Protect your molds, designs and trademark in China

A factory does not become your partner because it signed a proforma. As long as your designs, logo or design have no protection in China, they remain usable by others. A factory can copy your product, offer it to other buyers or use your mold for a competing order. This scenario is common and costly to undo afterwards.

Chinese law first protects rights registered on its territory. Your trademark registered in Europe is worthless in China. Your designs are automatically covered by copyright, but proof is debatable before a Chinese court, in Chinese. Better to build protection before the first exchange, not after the first dispute.

China applies the first-to-file principle: the trademark belongs to the one who files it first with the CNIPA, the Chinese intellectual property office, not to the one who uses it. Bad faith filings exist: third parties file established foreign trademarks to resell them to their owner or block its sales. The Chinese Trademark Law, amended in 2019, tightens the treatment of these abusive filings. Prevention remains less costly than challenge.

File before any public announcement, before first contact with a factory and before your store goes online. Filing is done by classes of the Nice Classification: cover your current products, related products and sales services. A foreign applicant goes through a licensed Chinese agency. You can also extend a base trademark to China through the Madrid system, administered by WIPO. A European registration does not cover China: these are two separate territories.

A standard confidentiality agreement prohibits disclosure. It does not prohibit using your information to produce for someone else, nor circumventing your relationship to cut you off from your clients or suppliers. That is exactly the risk with a factory. The NNN agreement addresses these three threats: non-disclosure, non-use, non-circumvention.

To be useful in China, this agreement must be written in Chinese and subject to Chinese law. An English contract will be translated in a Chinese court, and your version will lose precision. Include fixed financial penalties in the contract, otherwise you will have to prove your damages euro by euro. Have it signed before sending any drawing, not after the first order.

Tooling often costs several thousand euros, and the factory physically keeps it. If the contract says nothing, there is a temptation to use it for other clients, or to keep it as collateral when you want to leave. The rule to put in black and white: a mold paid for by the buyer remains the buyer's property, even if it sits in the Chinese workshop.

Request a separate invoice line for tooling, with its price. Have an identification number engraved on the mold and record it. The contract must provide for storage, access for inspection, prohibition of use by a third party, and conditions for return if you change factories. Our sinophone team in Guangzhou negotiates these clauses regularly: factories accept them when they are requested from the start.

Copyright protects your drawings in China without formalities, as China is a member of the Berne Convention. Keep dated evidence: source files, successive versions, timestamps. For the three-dimensional form of a product, the Chinese design patent provides registered protection, extended to fifteen years by the reform that came into effect in 2021. The invention patent runs for twenty years and the utility model for ten.

One rule counts more than others: file before disclosing. A public publication, a trade show, an online store can destroy the novelty required for a filing. The specifications and reference sample remain your technical safeguards, but they do not replace a timely filing.

A filing without monitoring is only half useful. Monitoring services track new trademarks similar to yours and allow you to file oppositions within deadlines. You can also register your trademark with Chinese customs: they can then block counterfeit exports. Major marketplaces like Alibaba offer reporting procedures to have counterfeit listings removed.

Faced with counterfeiting, two paths exist. Administrative action before the local market supervision authorities is fast and inexpensive, and can lead to seizure. Court action takes longer: China has specialized intellectual property courts in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou since 2014. In both cases, everything happens in Chinese, with evidence that often needs to be notarized.

Our sinophone team in Guangzhou prepares and negotiates NNN agreements in Chinese, checks mold ownership clauses in each purchase contract and coordinates your trademark filings with licensed agents in China. We read contracts in the language of the court that would judge them, not only in yours. Before opening a file, we also check the factory itself: a brokerage and sourcing house knows that an agreement is only worth as much as its signatory exists and honors its commitments.

In most cases, you do not pay fees: you open a file, we negotiate the goods for you and we take a commission on their EXW value. The protection of your assets is part of the negotiation itself, without an additional fee line.