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Apple foe Proview laughs off debts, ressurrects business

IPAD trademark combatant wants to sell bio-energy

Apple’s Chinese IPAD trademark nemesis Proview is set to kick start yet another business venture, having managed to attract over 100 million yuan (£10m) in funding to launch an LED lighting and bio-energy firm.

The firm’s charismatic founder Yang Rongshan is hoping to reinvent the company after its Shenzhen subsidiary was forced into bankruptcy and delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange a couple of years ago.

Miraculously, given the performance of Proview Technology (Shenzhen) and allegations of shady business practices in the past, Yang has successfully attracted Chinese and foreign investors to the project, according to Shanghai’s First Financial Daily (via Sina).

Yang is apparently aiming to resurrect the firm’s LED lighting business and, rather incongruously, enter the renewable energy space.

Proview invested a whopping $155m (£99m) in its LED manufacturing base in Shenzhen in 2008 and expanded to a Wuhan plant soon after, shortly before the bottom fell out of the business.

The Shenzhen plant is now in ruins, but Proview is hoping its Wuhan base can be resurrected to produce around five million LED units per year.

There was little info about the renewable energy plans for the business, except that Proview would co-operate with local investors and partners and expand internationally.

Confident as ever, Yang claimed the business would generating profits in a couple of quarters.

Followers of the long-running IPAD saga will remember that Proview Shenzhen still has debts potentially as high as $400m(£255m) to pay its creditors, including several Chinese banks, but Yang said this will not affect this entirely separate new business plan.

The firm’s lawyers Grandall are also among those yet to be paid, despite Proview managing to extract $60m from Apple for the IPAD name, and have made moves in court to seize the trademark until they are paid. ®

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