The copycats are coming for China's hit brands

Pinduoduo Starbucks's Chinese rival, Luckin Coffee, has fought a long legal battle with a look-alike in Thailand

- Sha Hua

For years, Western companies complained about Chinese copycats. Now, the copycats are coming for Chinese companies.

Starbucks's Chinese rival, Luckin Coffee, has fought a long legal battle with a lookalike in Thailand that it says damages its brand. Beverage franchise Heytea, which recently opened its first store in New York selling its signature cheese-foam tea, has faced off against its Singaporean doppelgänger Heetea.

And behind Nigeria's first lithium-processing plant, launched with great ceremony in October, isn't the China-based Tesla supplier Ganfeng Lithium but a local venture called Ganfeng Lithium Industry.

As more Chinese companies go overseas and become coveted brands, they are discovering one of the pitfalls of international success: imitators.

After all, "you are more at risk if you are actually successful and famous," says Catherine Lee, a senior partner at the international law firm Dentons Rodyk and one of the lawyers representing China's Heytea.

International lawyers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said that inquiries from Chinese companies seeking to protect their intellectual property had risen in recent years. There were nearly 6.2 million trademark registrations in China in 2022, triple the amount compared with five years earlier, according to data from the China National Intellectual Property Administration.

China has strengthened enforcement at home, with higher penalty fees for patent infringements, and shortened the time courts take to handle the cases. In 2022, China handled around 430,000 first-instance civil IP cases, up from 280,000 in 2018, according to China's Supreme People's Court.