16 May 2013Trademarks

China tops global trademark filings

China’s IP office published the most trademarks across all classes in 2012, an industry report has found.

The State Intellectual Property Office had posted 879,324 trademarks by December 18, 2012, Thomson Compumark said in its  2012 Trademark Report.

China was followed by the US (313,532), France (254,662), Turkey (134,596) and Japan (127,952) in the next four places. Of 186 countries surveyed, the Caribbean island of St Kitts and Nevis published the fewest trademarks last year, with just 17.

In China, class 25 – clothing, footwear and headgear – was the most popular trademark division, accounting for about 180,000 applications. Classes 35 (including advertising) and 9 (including scientific and nautical) represented about 90,000 applications each, while classes 30 (including coffee) and 29 (including meat) accounted for 80,000 and 60,000, respectively.

Compared with 2011, there was a collective minimal decrease in trademark activity across the top ten countries, as a result of a struggling global economy.

Individually, the UK published 10 percent more trademark applications than in 2011, according to the report, while trademark activity in Turkey jumped by 8 percent. Both rises were explained in the report by improving national economies.

Elsewhere in the report, companies producing consumer products accounted for the most (40 percent) published trademarks globally, closely followed by pharmaceutical companies (30 percent). Pharma producers Johnson & Johnson and Novartis took the top two spots, with consumer goods company Nestlé coming third.

The report concluded that brand expansion is one of many underlying factors driving world economies but “on a global scale, trademark growth hit a plateau in 2012, as the world economy continues to slowly recover from a devastating financial crisis”.

Already registered?

Login to your account

To request a FREE 2-week trial subscription, please signup.
NOTE - this can take up to 48hrs to be approved.

Two Weeks Free Trial

For multi-user price options, or to check if your company has an existing subscription that we can add you to for FREE, please email Adrian Tapping at atapping@newtonmedia.co.uk


More on this story

Trademarks
16 May 2023   Food and beverage brands drove worldwide trademark filings in 2022, finds Tom Phillips from the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting in Singapore.