That rides on China’s global strategy — A domain

This firm smartly upgraded its domain when it went global.

Image with green background that states "Domain Upgrades"

The best deal is where all parties win, and this is also the principle that China promotes in its global strategy. One firm must have heeded the advice and even implemented the principle in its domain.

Awinic is an integrated circuit (IC) design house that supplies chips to handset makers counting Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo. On August 16, it went public at the Shanghai Stock Exchange, making its CEO Hongjun Sun the latest billionaire in China.

Awinic (艾为) was founded in 2008, and used Awinic.com.cn as its corporate domain.

In the early years, the Awinic.com.cn domain was probably fine since the business was domestic. Also, Awinic.com was by now owned by a Chinese electronic component supplier. Still, the Awinic.com site was closed by the government in 2010 due to failure to obtain an ICP license.

Awinic.com became active again in 2019, and this time it is owned by the IC design house. English contents were also added to the site, signaling the launch of the firm’s global business. Awinic.com.cn now forwards to the fresh corporate domain.

How does the domain Awinic.com reflect the “all parties win” principle? According the its site, “awinic” is made up of “a” (meaning “all”), “win”, and “IC”. So, you have an IC supplier wanting to make sure all parties win.

The Chinese brand name Ai Wei (艾为) was likely created from the English brand name since Ai Wei sounds like “awinic” and has no meaning. In other words, the English name came first ahead of the Chinese name.

(AiWei.com is owned by a Chinese pesticide firm and AiWei.cn is still for sale.)

Here are my observations:

There are many Chinese firms like Awinic that prefer English-based domains.
.com is the first choice in China
.cn is secondary and less notable

So, if you have English-based .com domains, you may want to find out if any of them just happen to fall into the path of domain upgrade for a firm in China. Try “Three steps to Chinese end user research” and “7 ways to find contact email addresses for Chinese firms“.

Also on the wire