Fu Shuangjian, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), indicated recently that industry and commerce administration departments will continue to increase efficiency in a bid to shorten the time required to examine trademark applications to 10 months and the time required to adjudicate cases of objection and dispute to 20 months by the year 2012, to be on par with international standards.

Fu made the above remark at a conference on trademark strategy implementation experience sharing and trademark protection held in Suzhou.

Fu also disclosed that currently in developed countries in the West such as the US and Japan, trademark application examination usually takes about 10 months.

In 2000, the number of trademark applications submitted in China exceeded the number of applications examined, thus creating a huge backlog. By the end of 2007, the time required for examining was over three years. In 2008, SAIC introduced a series of measures to expedite trademark examination. By the end of 2010, the time required to examine trademark applications in China had been shortened to less than a year, completely solving the problem of backlog which had aroused extensive concern both at home and abroad.

Fu remarked that industry and commerce administration departments will continue to accelerate the pace of examination, shorten the time for trademark registration, and maintain the growth in the number of trademark registration applications and total number of valid registered trademarks. Meanwhile, a sound trademark examination system will be established to ensure that the passing rate of random quality check will reach over 99%. Efforts will be made to improve online trademark application work with the aim of raising the proportion of online trademark applications to 70% by the end of 2011.