Last week, we featured China Hearsay’s story about the trademark dispute between Proview Electronics and Apple over the legal rights to the name “iPad” in China. This update guesses that, contrary to speculation of the iPad being withdrawn from the Chinese market, the court cases will likely lead to a fine for Apple:

This is starting to look very ugly for Apple, and every day this goes on, the price for that trademark is probably going up. Proview is functionally bankrupt and they need the cash ASAP. It looks to me like they’re going to get it sooner or later. Perhaps Apple’s legal team knows something that we don’t, but even if they think they can win these legal challenges, the commercial disruptions in the meantime are going to be significant.

No word about how it’ll affect the launch of the iPad 3 (rumored to be next month). That’s okay though — those of you who plan to snatch one up on the first day probably have schemes to buy it elsewhere.

Harvard Business Review reports on the challenges of attracting and keeping loyal customers in China. It seems that despite wearing blinders for established brands, the number of brands that people will consider purchasing is rising. We certainly agree with the authors’ speculation that as people become wealthier, for many the emotional aspect of a brand outweighs the functional basis. (Look at how often real tech-heads are exasperated by Apple fanboys!) Their survey sheds new light on the reasons:

What’s increasingly tipping the scales between brands is which one makes consumers “feel good,” “feel special,” or “stand out in the crowd.” Our survey shows that as opposed to 8% in 2009, 19% of Chinese consumers purchasing chocolate in 2011 chose a brand based on emotional considerations such as it “made me feel good.”

Certainly yesterday’s Valentine’s Day chocolate sales would be expected to reflect this trend, as many young women probably expected only the best name-brand chocolates from her man, to be savored only after flaunting the box around Sanlitun for a while.

Fast Company has this round-up of the ten most innovative Chinese companies. Gracing the list are many familiar companies such as Tencent (now the third-largest publicly traded Internet company in the world), Lenovo (will it become China’s first global brand?) and Huawei (now selling its phones in Nigeria).

Fast Company has Tencent topping the China list and coming in eighth overall out of the top 50 (just behind the Occupy movement). We were inspired reading China’s top ten, and immediately started jotting down ideas for new tech startups and social networking plugins.