Lotus has officially regained the use of its logo, name, and Chinese trademark in a legal deal. This comes as the brand announces record sales in December 2024, which it claims makes Lotus 2024 among the top three ultra-luxury car brands.
Sales in December for the first time were over 2000 globally, although an exact figure has yet to be published. This is a record for the Lotus brand. The claim has also been made that Lotus now ranks among the top three ultra-luxury brands. It should be noted, however, that what this means has yet to be defined.
Itβs also been reported that Lotus Group CEO Feng Qingfeng issued an internal announcement Stating that Lotus has won its legal case. This means that from December 7, 2024, the round Lotus logo, Chinese language trademark Lianhua, and wordmark have been returned to the Lotus Group.
Lotus has been sold as Lotus NYO since Geely acquired a controlling stake in 2017. The problem with the Lotus name stems back to a deal with the Youngman Group in China during the early 2000s.
Initially, the deal included distribution rights for Lotus along with the right to the Chinese name Lianhua (Chinese for Lotus). Under the deal, Youngman imported the Lotus Europa.
From 1996, the Lotus brand was largely owned by the Malaysian car company Proton. Youngman also did a deal with Proton which covered the delivery of 30,000 CKD kits for what was known as the Proton GEN-2 in Malaysia.
This was the start of producing Proton based cars by the Youngman Group. The Jinhua, Zhejiang Province-based company then employed Lotus Engineering for the project. Cars became branded as Europestar with the wording βEngineered by Lotus.β Later, the Europestar brand name was dropped altogether, and the cars were simply labelled as Lianhua.
Itβs reported that the contract between Youngman and Proton expired in 2012, although the company continued to produce Proton base cars up until some point in 2015.
Both the UK side and Geely have been in lengthy legal proceedings in China to try to wrest control of the name back from the Youngman Group.
Itβs claimed that the victory in December comes after five years of work on the Chinese side and more than 20 years of litigation proceedings on the British side.
This means it will no longer be necessary to label Lotus in China as Lotus NYO.
2025 will be a key year for Lotus being the 75th anniversary of Formula One And the 50th anniversary of the Esprit.
Sources: Fast Technology, IT Home,
