As I have written before there was a lot of talk of Lidl in Australia a while back, this made me write about Lidl coming to my city.
Since then it seems to have gone off the boil a little bit but I have found a few more things out by searching for more information about Lidl in Australia around the web.
There are lots of news articles around saying that Lidl Australia isn’t too far away and they have already got an office in Melbourne, Victoria somewhere.
I haven’t been able to find any details about this Lidl Australia office yet other than an address change update on the IP details, but what I have found is there are quite a few IP trademarks, patents and designs that haven’t been fully accepted as yet.
The first one I found has been updated as recently as the beginning of July with an extension of time request prior to that.
So as a business and also if you making a sound business decision it wouldn’t make sense to launch your supermarket brand into a country without having all your IP protected and ready to go.
This would leave your business open for brand names and IP to be copied wouldn’t it?
Also, with this too, if you can’t trademark what you have, designing new brands to suit the country you are looking to do business in.
With a company the size of Lidl, as you can see in my infographic below how big they are compared to other supermarkets around, I’m sure the planning, vision and roll out of business wouldn’t be taken very lightly and the trademarking and registering would be all a part of the companies strategy to enter new markets.
Also another bit of information I have tracked down is the owner of the domain lidl.com.au is the company LIDL STIFUNG and CO KG Company.
Lidl.com.au when entered into your preferred web browser redirects you to the main Lidl website where you can pick from existing countries that have Lidl supermarkets.
For this domain there is 42 historical records that date back more than six years.
Also on this page I found that the last update to the lidl.com.au was on the 17th of April 2015, pretty recent huh?
The Lidl trademark brand design was registered from Aug 2000 with other Lidl logo trademarks in 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2014.
These trademark updates are probably in line with the Lidl logo updates as they are in different colours.
The latest request for the Lidl logo to be protected in Australia is pending with acceptance due in July 2016.
So, finally, if you look at all the information about Lidl in Australia, the work that is being done combined with a bit of speculation I’d be putting money on Lidl Australia opening in 2016/2017 after all the trademarks have been approved and all the loose ends tidied up.
I’ll keep on searching as I think we will be hearing more and more about this new supermarket chain entering the Australian market.
If you want to read my other thoughts on this supermarket, you can here “Lidl Australia“