At a recent forum, a higher official from SAIC said that by the end of September, there were 21,050,000 accumulated trademark applications, 13,840,000 accumulated registrations and 11,770,000 valid registered trademarks in China.
According to the statistics, the number of valid trademarks owned by per 10,000 market entities increased from 1,074 to 1,405, since 2011. This year, China ranked 25th in Global Innovation Index and is also the first middle income and developing country on the list.
It is noted that China is striding forward to become a trademark power. In BrandZ 2016 Top 100 released in June, the number of Chinese brands increased from 1 in 2006 to 15 in 2016. However, there are still some gaps between Chinese brands and brands in developed countries. China has only a small number of world famous brands; for example, in the 2015 World’s Top 500 Most Influential Brands by World Brand Lab, there were 228 American brands and merely 31 Chinese brands. Moreover, according to the data from WIPO, each American trademark can produce six times of the economic benefits of each Chinese trademark. In terms of overseas protection, relatively few Chinese brands seek trademark protection overseas; for instance, of over 2,800,000 trademark applications in 2014, only 4% were overseas trademark applications, whereas this percentage is 75% in Swiss and 45% in the United States.
Therefore, SAIC will further advance facilitation of trademark registrations, the oversight of trademarks, socialization of brand services, comprehensive brand building system, trademark internationalization, and the establishment of cooperative mechanism for handling trademark cases in countries and regions along the Belt and Road.
