According to a Chinese large enterprise data technology service company-TianYanCha, Beijing Chehejia Information Technology CoLtd, an affiliated company of Li Auto, applied for registration of several “Metaverse” trademarks in September 2021, and the status of the trademark was recently changed to “pending rejection review”.
The concept of metaverse has existed for a long time, and has recently been vigorously promoted by Facebook, which hopes to develop its business through a 3D virtual world network focusing on social connections, and therefore has invested a lot of money in its development.
However, it is not yet well received by the public and its development is limited. On the one hand, it is affected by the funding, because it needs a lot of computing power to maintain the 3D virtual environment, so the demand for chips is greatly increased which costs a lot, on the other hand, it is limited by the technology.
Even so, many different industries are trying to get ahead of the game. In China, Li Auto and BYD have registered the trademark of metaverse first and are ready to put it into their future development layout.
Why? It it worth it?
Obviously, with the current fierce competition in the EV industry, companies need to come up with different marketing strategies, and NIO has done a good example of this by creating a community of NIO users, thus enhancing their sense of belonging.
The Li Auto is a “single-model strategy”, meaning that one model is available, but in different colors, similar to Apple, and Apple’s success is definitely related to the community of its Apple user base.
But blind faith in the mainstream is never a good thing, as the metaverse has encountered technical problems of unprecedented magnitude, and VR technology has been in development for at least five years and is still facing many technical problems for the time being.
It’s still too early for the EV companies like Li Auto to develop in the metaverse. But applying for a trademark first is not a bad thing at all.
The trademark application was rejected reflects the Chinese government hopes that Chinese EV manufacturers should be down to earth rather than thinking about the future far away at once.
