China Trademark 50 provides clues for domain investing – Domain Name Wire

Kassey Lee examines more data about what domains Chinese companies choose.

When running a business, we need to know our customers in order to provide the right products to them. This is also true when selling domains to end users in China.

For that purpose, I have studied the top 100 internet companies in China and Fortune China 100 companies. Today, we’ll look at “China Trademark 50” published by World Trademark Review, which lists companies in China holding the most trademarks. These companies are leaders in corporate China and therefore can show us the overall domain preference of Chinese companies.

Below is the list. Because two companies are foreign (Disney and Sanrio) and 10 companies could not be found, that leaves 38 companies on the list which are meaningful for our analysis.

Here are the results. 92% use .com and only 8% use .cn domains. No other extensions are involved. The median length of the names (excluding extension) is 6 characters and the majority (84%) are 10 characters or less.

29% of the domains are not brand-matching. For example, Great Wall Motors is known as GWM but its corporate domain is GWM-global.com, not GWM .com (developed). Another example is Alpha using gdAlpha.com, not Alpha .com (developed). An opportunity arises if you happen to own the upgrades for non-brand-matching domains.

Pinyin domains are most popular at 46%, followed by English-based domains at 35%. One company uses a numeric domain (4399.com), and three companies prefer acronyms: JD.com, FAW.com, and CCTV.com.

The fact that 10 out of the 50 companies could not be located is very telling. It shows that many Chinese companies still do not understand the importance of domains and making them visible in the digital world.

In short, invest in short Pinyin/English-based .com domains for end users in China.