Mongol Pencil

Also known as: Mongol · Mongol pencil (Filipino generic usage for any pencil) · Mongol No. 2 (the everyday writing grade; No. 2 corresponds to HB) · Woodcase pencil · Lapis (Tagalog word for pencil)

Philippine genericide: brand names that became everyday Filipino words

Definition

Mongol is a brand of woodcase pencil created by the American manufacturer Eberhard Faber, whose namesake founder, John Eberhard Faber, established his pencil company in New York in 1861. The name belongs to a family of “Oriental” pencil branding that followed the late-nineteenth-century fashion for yellow pencils: when the Koh-I-Noor of L. & C. Hardtmuth set the premium standard in 1890, competitors adopted both the yellow paint and evocative eastern names — Mikado (later renamed Mirado) and Mongol — in nod to the Siberian graphite then considered the world’s finest. (Wikipedia — Eberhard Faber, Wikipedia — Pencil)

In the Philippines, “Mongol” long ago escaped its trademark moorings and became the everyday Filipino word for a pencil of any brand — a genericide parallel to “vetsin” for monosodium glutamate and “rugby” for contact cement. The brand was introduced to the country before World War II by the American Rolland E. Thompson through his company Rennolds Enterprises, Inc., working with the Philippine firm H.G. Henares & Sons, Inc., and from 1963 it was manufactured locally under license by Amalgamated Specialties Corporation (AMSPEC). The mark’s Philippine registration became the subject of a landmark cancellation dispute decided by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) in favor of the local manufacturer in 2009. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation) The word is not to be confused with “Mongol” as an ethnonym for the people of Mongolia.

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	Eberhard Faber
Wikidata	N/A
DBpedia	N/A
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	mongol (Tagalog; listed as a synonym of lapis, “pencil”)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	Mongol pencil Eberhard Faber Philippines genericized trademark school supplies
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Mongol
Mongol pencil (Filipino generic usage for any pencil)
Mongol No. 2 (the everyday writing grade; No. 2 corresponds to HB)
Woodcase pencil
Lapis (Tagalog word for pencil)

Examples and Analogies

A genericide in yellow paint: Like “jeepney” for rebuilt jeeps or “Colgate” for toothpaste in Philippine speech, “Mongol” functions as the default noun for its category — the purchasing public came to associate the mark so completely with AMSPEC’s product that the Philippine Trademark Office record itself treats genericness as a live legal question. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)
The yellow-pencil aristocracy: Mongol sits in the same naming tier as Mikado and Koh-I-Noor — brands that borrowed the prestige of Siberian graphite and eastern exoticism to sell a painted cedar shaft; roughly three-quarters of pencils made in the United States ended up yellow in imitation of the fashion. (Wikipedia — Pencil)
A license printed on the barrel: Philippine-made Mongols carried the line “Manufactured in the Philippines Under License from Eberhard Faber, Inc. U.S.A.” — a physical reminder that the brand was American-owned even as its production, and eventually its legal identity, became Filipino. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)
A counterfeit magnet: The brand’s dominance made it a target for fakes; by 2012 the NBI in Cebu was raiding retailers selling counterfeit Mongols, and the trademark owner warned it would prosecute outlets carrying them. (Philstar — Buyers warned vs fake Mongol pencils)

Usage Scenarios

1. School and Everyday Writing

The Mongol No. 2 (equivalent to grade HB) has been the standard school pencil of the Philippines for generations — the grading system that made “number two” the canonical test-taking pencil in American and Philippine schools alike maps directly onto the international H–B scale. (Wikipedia — Pencil)

2. Local Manufacture Under License

From 1963 to the late 2000s, AMSPEC manufactured woodcase Mongol pencils at its Muntinlupa facilities under a series of technical license agreements with Eberhard Faber (1964, 1974, 1984, and 1994), paying royalties on sales and shipping samples to the licensor for approval. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)

3. Trademark Enforcement

Because the brand commanded the majority of the Philippine pencil market, its owners and licensees litigated repeatedly against imitators — from a 1990s unfair competition case against a local distributor to the 2012 counterfeit crackdowns in Cebu. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation, Philstar — Buyers warned vs fake Mongol pencils)

4. Philately and Cultural Recognition

The Philippine Postal Corporation issued commemorative stamps honoring the Mongol pencil; the April 1999 philatelic bulletin and the stamps themselves were entered as exhibits in the IPOPHL cancellation case as evidence of the brand’s place in Philippine life. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)

Strategies

Build the brand through the licensee: Eberhard Faber licensed the mark but left advertising, distribution, and quality to AMSPEC, which spent heavily on promotion and built the mark’s goodwill in the Philippines — a strategy that later backfired legally when the licensor’s lack of quality control led IPOPHL to call the arrangements “naked licenses.” (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)
Defend through registration: Berol Corporation (successor to Eberhard Faber) held Philippine Registration No. 026312, obtained in 1978, and registered the Mongol mark in more than thirty countries — including the United States and Venezuela — to ring-fence the brand globally. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)
Fight genericide with enforcement: Faced with a market where the name meant “pencil” itself, the mark’s owners combined raids, warnings, and court actions to keep the brand identifiable; the 2012 Berol notice pledged criminal prosecution for sellers of fakes. (Philstar — Buyers warned vs fake Mongol pencils)
Localize or lose: AMSPEC’s own filings argued that it alone had manufactured, improved, and defended the pencil for nearly fifty years — positioning local use, not foreign paper title, as the true source of the mark’s Philippine value. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)

Security and Safety Measures

Product-liability insurance: The license agreements required AMSPEC to carry product-liability coverage (from ₱200,000 per person in the 1964 agreement to ₱1 million aggregate by 1994) — an early consumer-safety mechanism for a product used by schoolchildren. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)
Anti-counterfeit enforcement: Counterfeit pencils of unknown material quality prompted NBI raids and public warnings, protecting consumers from substandard imitations sold to students. (Philstar — Buyers warned vs fake Mongol pencils)
Quality control by the licensee: After the licensor stopped inspecting, AMSPEC imposed its own standards — its filings describe eliminating chronic pencil splits, sharpening smoothness, and improving casing colors — safety-by-reputation in a market with no other referee. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)

Historical Context

John Eberhard Faber founded his pencil company in Midtown Manhattan in 1861; after an 1872 fire the firm moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and grew into one of America’s great pencil houses. The yellow “Oriental” naming fashion of the 1890s gave the firm its flagship Mongol line. The company built an unusual international footprint — a partnership with the Pardo family in Caracas dated to 1896 — and after Faber-Castell USA acquired its American operations in 1987, the business was sold to Newell Brands on October 18, 1994, for $137.3 million and folded into Newell’s Sanford division, with Sanford acquiring the Venezuelan affiliate in 1997. (Wikipedia — Eberhard Faber)

The Philippine chapter began before World War II, when Rolland E. Thompson brought woodcase Mongols into the country through Rennolds Enterprises, Inc., in tandem with H.G. Henares & Sons, whose facilities made the pencils. In 1963 Henares spun those facilities into a new company, Amalgamated Specialties Corporation, which Thompson and local investors then acquired. Successive license agreements (1964–1994) governed production until the relationship soured: AMSPEC filed a cancellation petition against Berol Corporation on June 20, 2008, and in a decision dated December 17, 2009, IPOPHL’s Bureau of Legal Affairs invalidated the agreements as naked licenses, found the mark abandoned by the foreign registrant, and ordered Berol’s Registration No. 026312 cancelled. Berol and its parent Newell Rubbermaid nonetheless continued to assert the Mongol mark in the Philippines afterward, as shown by their 2012 counterfeit enforcement campaign. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation, Philstar — Buyers warned vs fake Mongol pencils)

Challenges and Controversies

Who Owns a Brand the Public Made?

The 2008–2009 IPOPHL case posed the question directly: AMSPEC argued that its decades of exclusive manufacture, advertising, and enforcement made it the mark’s true owner in the Philippines, while Berol answered that a licensee’s use always inures to the licensor. The Bureau sided with AMSPEC, cancelling the registration — a ruling that dramatizes the tension between trademark formalism and local goodwill. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)

Genericide Pressure

A mark that becomes the common name of its product can be cancelled under Philippine law — a risk the Mongol name carries wherever Filipinos use it simply to mean “pencil.” The case record shows both sides fighting on precisely this terrain of public association. (IPOPHL — AMSPEC v. Berol Corporation)

Counterfeiting

By 2012 fake Mongols had spread nationwide enough to draw NBI raids in Cebu and a public warning from Berol Corporation, a wholly owned Newell Rubbermaid company described as the trademark owner of Mongol — a contest between enforcement capacity and the sheer popularity of the brand. (Philstar — Buyers warned vs fake Mongol pencils)

Name and Sensitivity

In international English, “Mongol” as a noun is an ethnonym for the people of Mongolia and, in older dated usage, a derogatory term for persons with Down syndrome; in Philippine usage the word carries none of these senses and refers only to the pencil. The homonymy occasionally requires disambiguation in international contexts. (Wiktionary — Mongol)