A climate change in the US trade mark registration landscape

Article  \  16 Jul 2018

US trade mark filing statistics for 2017 have recently been published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) showing some interesting trends and results.

The top spot for 2017 US trade mark filings was taken from LG of Korea, who filed 433 US trade marks in 2016, by a 71 year old doctor from New York who filed just over 300 US trade mark applications last year. Trade marks such as ‘AREACODE Doctors’ suggests a business model involving medical services. Before 2017, he only had 1 US trade mark.

Of the top 10 US trade mark applicants for 2017, nearly half of them were from outside of the US. The Australian gambling hardware and tech company Aristocrat came in at number three in the rankings.

Top US trade mark applicants

Source: WIPO Statistics Database

Over the past five years, USPTO has seen a tenfold increase in trade mark applicants from China. Last year, over 50,000 US trade mark applications were received from China amongst a rapidly growing total number of trade marks filed.

Trade marks filed in the US

Source: WIPO Statistics Database

This trend is also reflected in US patent filings, where a tenfold increase has been seen in US patents awarded to Chinese companies in the past 10 years. In 2017, China ranked in the top five US patent recipients for the first time, reflective of a large increase in innovation spending and research and development incentives by the Chinese government. Patent application numbers in China for 2017 continue the staggering trend, with over 1.3m patent applications filed there in 2017. This is more than the combined total of patents filed in the USA, Japan, South Korea and Europe.