Candy Crush Saga maker King trademarks word ‘candy’

January 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Candy Crush Saga maker King trademarks word ‘candy’

11:17am EST

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Videogame maker King, creator of the Candy Crush Saga, a game that has millions of fans around the world, said on Tuesday it had trademarked the word “candy” to protect the game from persistent intellectual property infringements.Created in 2003, King has experienced an explosion in popularity since launching on Facebook in 2011 with its saga games, in which players move through a competitive landscape and pass their friends on the way.

Candy Crush Saga was the top downloaded free app for 2013, and the year’s top revenue grossing app. It has been downloaded more than 500 million times since its launch in 2012.

The company now says it wants to protect its game title from imitators who also use the word “candy”. It has obtained a trademark from the European Union, which will apply not only to computer games, but also to areas such as clothes and footwear, the European Commission’s trademark office told Reuters.

“We don’t enforce against all uses of ‘candy’ – some are legitimate and of course, we would not ask app developers who use the term legitimately to stop doing so,” King spokesman Martin Bunge-Meyer said.

King is still waiting approval for a similar trademark in the United States, Bunge-Meyer added.

King’s games appeal to a growing trend for players, more and more of them female, to play puzzle games with their friends in short bursts, especially as games are increasingly played on the move on phones or tablets to kill spare minutes.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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