In 2021 alone, there were 4,545 trademark applications filed in the country of Monaco. With a population of just 39,150 people in the country, that’s quite a bit of applications! That’s a rate of 11,609.20 per 100,000 people, which was the highest in the world that year. This new infographic from the team at Nominus looks at which countries applied for the most trademarks around the world, based on the total applications per 100,000 people in 2021.
The earliest known “trademarks” can be found in cave paintings from the stone age, and branding of livestock was meant to identify personal property. However, the first trademark to be registered was the Bakers’ Marking Law, which was enacted by the British Parliament in 1266, which made it a requirement for every baker to mark the bread that they made.
According to the research conducted by the team at Nominus, it was found that Monaco had the most trademark applications per 100,000 people (in 2021). Here are the countries with the most trademark applications per 100,000 people during that time. Following Nominus are the following countries, with their number of trademark applications in 2021 per every 100,000 people: Liechtenstein (11,412.44), São Tomé and Príncipe (11,376.45), Malta (5,494.63), Luxembourg (5,431.39), San Marino (4,416.16), Cyprus (4,058.93), Andorra (2,930.63), Switzerland (2,133.40), and Estonia (2,038.75).
However, despite all of this, while these countries all had the highest rates of applications, the country with the most actual trademark applications in 2021 was China, with 7,066,435. Other countries in the top three include the United States with 1,193,938 trademark applications and Germany with 903,286 trademark applications. In fact, China, Germany, and the United States were the only three countries in the world with more than 500,000 trademark applications filed in 2021 alone.
