Lotus Wins Big By Reacquiring Brand Name From Youngman Amidst Record Sales

Lotus seems to be eating well this new year as after 11 years of gruelling legal battles, the British sports car brand announced that they’ve finally regained their brand rights from Youngman in China. While this was going on, Lotus also announced that they had record breaking sales during December last year, with 2,000 units sold globally for the first time in their 77-year history.

For some context, the now defunct Youngman was an automaker in China that had a joint venture with Proton back in 2007. Since our national carmaker owned Lotus at the time, the sports car brand was forced to give away its brand name for the Chinese automaker. This eventually led Youngman to drop their Europestar branding to Lianhua (Chinese for lotus) for their Gen 2 models.

Lotus has since been bought by Geely in 2017 and their models have been sold under the Lotus NYO name in China. Why the NYO at the end you might ask? Even though Youngman stopped producing vehicles in 2015 and was later declared bankrupt, they still had the rights to Lotus’s name. This gave the British automaker and Geely a splitting headache trying to reacquire their branding back, leading to a long legal battle that lasted for over 5 years for the Chinese side and over 20 years of litigation from Lotus.



The court was in favor of Lotus and won the legal battle on December 7th, giving them the rights to use the Lotus logo, as well as the ability to drop the NYO name in favor of the more suiting Lianhua trademark for all their models. 

“The reason why we insisted on taking back “Lotus” is because it is our most important asset that enables us to cross cycles, overcome difficulties, and be remembered and paid tribute to by the industry, users and car fans,” said CEO Feng Qingfeng in a heartfelt press release.

“It is the compass in our hearts and Lotus Engineering and Lotus Team are our most precious brand totems.”



On another good note, the automaker has officially announced that they’ve changed their name in China from “路特斯” to “莲花跑车” from yesterday onwards. Where the previous name was a direct English pronunciation of their brand, the new name translates to Lotus Sports Cars in Chinese.


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