Analysis of trend of trademark filings by industry with Taiwan IPO and WIPI 2023 statistics

　The World Intellectual Property Organizations (WIPO) published the World Intellectual Property Indicators 2023: WIPI 2023 on November 6, 2023 to make public the data regarding the global trademark filings, number of registrations, average pendency times for first office action and final decision, statistics of final decisions, application class count per unit of GDP and application class count per million population of each country throughout 2022.  Taiwan IPO released the “Analysis of Trends in Trademark Applications Filed by the Industry from 2018 through 2022” to present a brief analysis and comparison between Taiwan’s data of filings in 2022 and the WIPO 2023 as summarized below.  

　1.  Throughout 2022, the worldwide trademark applications and application class counts substantially decline by 15.7% and 14.5%, respectively, even though the number of worldwide trademark applications filed in 2022 is 3.5 times that of 2008.  China’s application class count reached above 7.513 million, holding onto the top position and largely surpassing the US, by nearly tenfold, at the 2^nd position with 767,000 class counts.  In addition, Taiwan’s application class count was over 122,000 to rank 18^th globally, down one spot from the previous year, while Taiwan’s registration class count was 102,000 to come in 18^th globally as well.  

　2.  In 2022, Taiwan saw a slight drop in the number of applications and class counts by 1.17% and 0.68%, respectively.  Notably, Taiwan experienced an 11.7% rise in the number of trademark applications and also an 11.2% increase in the class count for the past five years.  

　3.  The top four industry sectors of the non-resident filings in Taiwan and of the WIPO trademark filings are the same, and the distributions of the filings for the four industry sectors at Taiwan IPO and the WIPO are quite similar.  The four sectors include, in descending order, “Research and technology”, “Health”, “Clothing and accessories”, and “Leisure and education”.  The non-resident applications filed for the sector of “Health” at the Taiwan IPO strikingly outstripped those reported in the WIPO statistics, which reveals that non-resident applicants place importance on their brand development in that sector in Taiwan.  

　In spite of the short-term industrial impact and economic recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic raging from 2019 through 2021, businesses worldwide maintain their sustained efforts and entrepreneurship spirit to seek business opportunities by developing the goods and services resulting from the pandemic, which leads to a surge in global trademark filing activity.  With the pandemic winding down from 2022, businesses around the world began to struggle with other crises of high inflation and rise of living cost in economy and also instability in geopolitics.  The global economy has not fully recovered to the pre-pandemic level, but there were still nearly 11.8 million trademark applications filed worldwide for more than 15.50 million classes.  By contrast, the economy in Taiwan went through less severe impact and has gradually returned to pre-pandemic level.  Throughout 2022, there had been a total of 95,000 trademark applications filed for over 120,000 classes, placing Taiwan at the 18^th position globally, while the proportion of non-resident applications in Taiwan slightly decreased to 29% of the total applications.  (Released 2024.01.25)  
/CCS