By Xiaoming Liu, Chofn IP
The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) recently released statistics for 2020 relating to trademark applications, registrations, oppositions and other types of cases as follows:
1. More than 9 million applications filed by Chinese applicants.
The number of new applications filed by Chinese applicants (including the applicants from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) totaled 9,116,454, calculated from December 16, 2019 to December 15, 2020, which represents a year-on-year increase of around 20%.
2. About 150,000 trademarks were rejected because of bad faith or hoarding purpose since 2018.
3. Of the new applications, 97.5% were filed by the Chinese entities, 2.5% by foreigners.
Although official statistics has not been released for the number of applications filed by foreign applicants in 2020, according to the official statistics from December 16, 2019 through November 15, 2020, 8,408,825 new applications were filed, of which 8,198,323 (97.5%) were filed by Chinese applicants, including that from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and 210,502 (2.5%) were filed by non-Chinese applicants.
4. Valid trademark registrations have added up to 30 million.
In 2020, 5.761 million trademarks were registered, of which 184,107 (about 3%) registrations were from non-Chinese registrants.
By the end of 2020, the number of trademark registrations in CNIPA’s trademark registry have reached 30.173 million. Due to such big number of prior registrations, it is very difficult to get a new trademark registered smoothly. The good news is that many prior registrations can be cleared off by non-use cancellation. The success rate of non-use cancellation is higher than 70% based on some non-official statistics.
5. Statistics relating to opposition, appeal against rejection, invalidation, appeal against non-use cancellation (from December 16, 2019 through December 15, 2020).
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134,326 oppositions;
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298,171 appeals against rejection;
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53,019 invalidations; and
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12,615 appeals against decision of cancellation, mostly for non-use cancellation.
