Report: HP Sells Palm Trademark to Chinese Consumer Electronics Maker

Alcatel One Touch, a low-end smartphone brand owned by Chinese consumer electronics maker TCL, appears to have purchased the iconic Palm brand name, trademarks and service marks from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), according to a webOS Nation report.

Because IT history zips by faster than a finger snap, you may not remember that in 2010 HP bought Palm, at that time a fading star but still useful, for a whopping $1.2 billion, only to bungle the deal, dismantling the brand in about a year and subsequently opting out of making WebOS-based devices altogether.

Since then, HP apparently has been sitting on the dormant Palm brand name. But webOS Nation has kept tabs on palm.com, lately sending visitors to mynewpalm.com rather than hpwebos.com, which is where the story gets interesting with some detective work tossed in.

As webOS Nation uncovered, a Trademark Assignment Cover Sheet dated Nov. 11, 2014 shows a company named Wide Progress Global Ltd.–a British Virgin Islands registered firm–assigned the Palm trademarks and service marks, effective October 31, 2014. Rishi Varma, HP Deputy General Counsel and senior vice president, signed the document for HP and Nicolas Zibell, who serves as Alcatel One Touch’s Americas and Pacific president, inked it for Wide Progress Global.

It’s Zibell’s signature that moves the pointer squarely on to Alcatel One Touch as the real buyer of the Palm materials.

Alcatel One Touch’s parent TCL is the 25th largest consumer electronics manufacturer and, after Samsung and LG, with 18 million TVs made last year ranks as the third-largest supplier. If you’ve never hear of TCL, part of the reason is the company isn’t exactly a household name in the U.S. But, if it wants to expand its smartphone presence to the U.S., sporting a still highly recognizable brand such as Palm won’t hurt its cause. Or, at the very least, it can’t do worse than HP.

According to its web site, Alcatel One Touch recently produced its 300 millionth smartphone, opening a new facility in Huizhou it said will nearly double manufacturing capacity from 65 million units to about 120 million units annually.

Right now, there’s no word either from TCL or Alcatel One Touch, about what it might be thinking about doing with the Palm brand it appears to have just bought. Still, with CES this week in Las Vegas, maybe we’ll get some more clues about what’s up with the Palm brand’s possible reincarnation.