China to surpass US for foreign trademark filings: report
China is on course to overtake the US as the world’s leading source of trademark applications filed on foreign registers by 2020, according to new research by CompuMark.
The report, called “ Chinese brands go global”, said that the volume of Chinese trademark applications to foreign registers has doubled in the past two years.
Last year, China filed nearly 120,000 foreign trademark applications, more than 50,000 of which were filed in the US. This is equivalent to around 10% of all applications made to the US trademark register in one year.
According to the research, the number of trademark applications filed by Chinese brands in the US has increased by 800% since 2014.
CompuMark’s report identified the US as the “major market” for Chinese brands. This represents a shift from the traditional target markets of Southeast Asia, according to CompuMark.
Jeff Roy, president of CompuMark, said that “by filing volume, our report shows that in just four years, Chinese brands have jumped from number ten in the world to number two” for filing trademarks abroad.
Roy added that if current trends continue, Chinese brands are likely to challenge their US counterparts for “global supremacy”.
The report also showed that China’s domestic trademark register is the largest in the world. In 2017, it accepted more than five million new trademark applications.
On an international level, 60% of trademark applications in 2017 were on the China register, according to the report. Meanwhile, more trademark applications were submitted to China in September 2017 than were submitted for the whole of the EU in 2016.
Rob Davey, senior director for managed solutions and global market at CompuMark, said that Chinese applications are playing an important role in international markets.
“China, with its allure as the world’s largest single market and a population with growing purchasing power, has features prominently on the radar of global brand owners.
“But our exclusive analysis by CompuMark’s data analytics experts shows that Chinese trademark applicants are having a significant impact on the world’s trademark registers,” he added.
