Italian confectionery giant Ferrero has won a long-running case against a Chinese producer that copied its celebrated Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
The Supreme Court in Beijing upheld a 2007 sentence ordering Montresor, the chocolate arm of Chinese food group Liangfeng, to stop producing its virtually identical Tresor Dore' chocolates.
Montresor was also ordered to pay Ferrero ''symbolic'' damages of 50,000 euros.
The high court's ruling was hailed as offering hope to all those foreign companies who have found it hard to make inroads into the Chinese market - especially ones who, after all their hard work, have then been faced with illegal clones.
The 2007 verdict overturned one issued a year previously.
The initial ruling claimed Montresor's chocolate ''has a higher reputation and has been a famous product for a longer period'' than the Italian original.
This third, definitive ruling ''finally secures the rights of our flagship brand of gold-wrapped pralines,'' said the CEO of the Italian company, Giovanni Ferrero.
CEO Ferrero - who recently overtook Silvio Berlusconi as Italy's richest man - immediately telephoned Italian Ambassador to China Riccardo Sessa to thank him for the Italian government's ''unstinting'' support ''in and out of court''.
Ferrero assured Sessa that the Italian confectionery maker - also famed for another iconic hazelnut-chocolate product, the Nutella spread - had no intention of leaving the Chinese market.
''On the contrary, we plan to expand here,'' he said.
Ferrero has been marketing its famed pralines in China since the 1980s. Some 20 Chinese companies have been producing 'cloned' versions but Montresor was the only one judged dangerous enough to really hurt its product.
The Luxembourg-registered Italian confectioner - whose other leading products include Pocket Coffee, Mon Cheri liqueurs and its tiny Tic Tic mints - has spent some one million dollars over the past few years defending its rights in China.
It claims to have had many products, including its Kinder chocolate eggs, counterfeited here.
Ferrero was founded by confectioner Pietro Ferrero in 1946 at Pino Torinese near Turin. It employs almost 20,000 people and has revenue of some $5.6 billion a year.
Monday's sentence was hailed as a landmark for the many Italian producers of quality food whose products are copied by Chinese manufacturers.
''This is an important victory for all Italian firms, because the copies of 'Made in Italy' products are, unfortunately, a widespread phenomenon,'' the Ferraro company said in a statement.
''It is already hard for Italian companies, and foreign ones in general, to get into China, overcome resistance put up against foreign products, build up a commercial network and invest in the country only to be be faced with a strong and invisible enemy like the counterfeiting industry''.
The sentence therefore ''opens scenarios of new development, capable of attracting ever-increasing amounts of investment capital into China''.
