When I read the article, it actually seems a bit complicated and not so cut and dry.
If foreign companies want to enter China, they need to obey Chinese law, especially when those laws aren't malicious, make sense, and are enforced correctly, even if the result is ludicrous. Any country should expect the same when a foreign company comes to compete within their shores. And in this particular case, it doesn't seem ludicrous.
Here's a ludicrous example, a close cousin to domain name squatting:
What Apple has going for it here is the fact that it has Foxconn as a key manufacturing partner, which is a huge employer in China. That may give it some political power. Who knows. In the end, $1.6b is chump change for Apple, and it may be worth it for them to just settle.
What Apple has going for it here is the fact that it has
Foxconn as a key manufacturing partner, which is a huge
employer in China. That may give it some political power.
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. That doesn't count as "political power" in China.
Foxconn employs over a million Chinese citizens. They undoubtably have enormous amounts of guanxi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi) with all levels of the government, from local to national.
I am familiar with how China operates. Being close with the govt/CCP in China is standard practice.
So you must also be aware that Foxconn has come under very intense media scrutiny in _China_ since a couple of years ago. Consider this sequence of events:
Of course this observation doesn't depend on Foxconn being Taiwanese. But the two are not necessarily unrelated given the increasingly nationalist trajectory of Chinese policy. And more in response to the nature of Foxconn's guanxi with the govt, no amount of it can save Foxconn from uniform wage increases or increasingly negative _Chinese_ media coverage.
It would be more useful if other bottles were included in the comparison. It doesn't matter if two brands of water bottle look alike, if all the other water bottles not pictured also look that way.
If foreign companies want to enter China, they need to obey Chinese law, especially when those laws aren't malicious, make sense, and are enforced correctly, even if the result is ludicrous. Any country should expect the same when a foreign company comes to compete within their shores. And in this particular case, it doesn't seem ludicrous.
Here's a ludicrous example, a close cousin to domain name squatting:
http://www.chinahearsay.com/coca-cola-plays-it-smart-in-its-...
What Apple has going for it here is the fact that it has Foxconn as a key manufacturing partner, which is a huge employer in China. That may give it some political power. Who knows. In the end, $1.6b is chump change for Apple, and it may be worth it for them to just settle.