Last month, UFSoft, China’s largest business software company, announced it renamed to UFIDA. The company said that the new corporate brand name represents its new positioning that it wants to be a global solution provider.

Established in 1988 in Beijing and listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE:600588) in 2001, UFSoft has grown to become a great local-focused ERP vendor with nearly US$88 million annual turnover last year.

“The software market has evolved; products and services must now work hand in hand to deliver value to enterprises. Ufida will develop along this strategic direction,” said Wang Wen-jing, Founder and CEO of Ufida.

“We are fully prepared, and excited to meet the bigger challenges ahead as we evolve from a domestic software company into an international market leader. We are proud to mark this transition by adopting our new name, Ufida ? with ‘U’ referring to you, our valued customers and ‘fid’ being the root for ‘fidelity’. The new name reinforces our company’s pledge as a trusted partner for our customers,” Wang added.

The company’s Chinese corporate brand name is Yong You. Yong means use and using, and You means friend and friendly, The company didn’t change their Chinese name in this rebranding exercise.

There are two common design strategies to create new corporate identity: one is to design a new symbol which is a non-typographic element of an abstract or representational nature, designers also create the logotype of company name and develop visual identity system. The other is to design company name to be a word mark and develop visual identity system without symbol.

UFIDA chose the second way but lost its original symbol which is a red heart with double line. I believe it’s not a good idea. Company must keep the valuable visual asset and update it like UPS. Maybe Ufida could redesign its red heart. Here are two hearts to use for reference. One is Wall’s that is an ice cream business of Unilever, and the other is Invistathat is a spinout of DuPont's fibers and textiles.

UFIDA is made up of five uppercase letters in Arial font. It isn’t an excellent logotype. In first sight, I couldn’t figure out it is a software company. I suppose people will think it is an engineering or equipment company…. I put HONDA’s logo beside UFIDA above. Its current design style uses lowercase because it is soft, service-oriented, friendly, kindly and humanistic……

Kingdee, the main rival of UFIDA in China , changed its brand identity to lowercase from uppercase, while remaining its corporate color palette in April, 2004.

Silicon Graphics, Inc., one of the world's leading manufacturers of specialized computer equipment, repositioned its brand worldwide with a new name and visual identity in 1999. Sgi, the short name had been designed to be a new corporate brand in lowercase by Joe Stitzlein of Landor.