Annual Trademark Report Nepal

Nepal has no annual trademark report. The Department of Industry publishes the Industrial Property Bulletin instead, issue by issue. We extract every one, so this page reports what the published record actually contains rather than what a national statistics release would say.

Key takeaways

• Our archive covers 122 Bulletin issues and 71,536 published trade mark entries, read on 1 October 2026.
• Class 30 — coffee, tea, confectionery and grain foods — is the largest class by a wide margin.
• Goods classes hold 83% of the register. Nepal's published record is a goods record.
• About 60% of published marks name a Nepali owner, so two in five are foreign.
• 28,186 applicant rows resolve to roughly 19,900 distinct owners once address spellings are grouped.
• Published is not registered: a Bulletin entry shows a mark reached publication, nothing more.

Does Nepal publish an annual trademark report?

Not in the form most people expect. There is no yearly statistical release giving filings, registrations, refusals and renewals in one document, and we have found none on the Department's site.

What exists is the Bulletin: a periodical carrying published marks, renewals, cancellations and corrections. It is authoritative, but it is a notice journal, not a dataset, and nobody tallies it. Our guide to the application process explains where publication sits in the sequence.

So we do. Every issue is downloaded, every entry extracted, and the result sits behind the public trade mark search. The figures below come out of that extraction, and we state the basis for each.

What exactly is in this dataset?

122 issues, 71,536 published trade mark entries, 28,186 applicant rows and 100 countries represented. Figures read on 1 October 2026.

Three caveats go with every number here. These are published marks, so the set excludes applications still awaiting publication. It carries no registration status, so a published mark may later have been refused, opposed or cancelled. And it is our extraction of an official source, not an official statistic.

Treat them as the best available read of the public record, which is a genuinely useful thing, and not as a figure from the Department of Industry itself.

Which NICE classes dominate the Nepali register?

Food and drink, by some distance. The NICE classification splits goods and services into 45 classes, and five of them carry just over 42% of everything published.

One class in seven is Class 30. If you are naming a snack, a tea or a biscuit, you are filing into the most crowded part of Nepal's register, and a clearance search matters more there than almost anywhere else.

Why is clothing not in the top five?

Because the usual list is borrowed. Articles about Nepali filing habits often lead with Class 25 for clothing and Class 43 for restaurants, and the register does not support either.

Class 25 holds 2,689 published entries, which puts it ninth. Class 43 holds 1,540. Both are real sectors with real brands, but neither is close to the food and drink classes above them. An earlier version of this page repeated that borrowed ranking, and we have corrected it.

Is Nepal's register a goods register or a services register?

Overwhelmingly goods. Classes 1 to 34 account for 59,388 published entries; classes 35 to 45 account for 12,143.

That is a five-to-one split, and it says something about who files. Manufacturers, importers and distributors protect product names as a matter of routine. Service businesses — consultancies, clinics, schools, software firms — mostly do not, even when the name is the whole business.

If you run a service business, the practical reading is that your sector is under-protected rather than safe. Our note on goods versus services classification covers which side your activity falls on.

How much of the register is foreign-owned?

About two in five published marks name an owner outside Nepal. Nepali owners account for 43,005 entries of the 71,536, and the next four countries are India, the United States, China and Japan.

That matters because Nepal sits outside the Madrid System, whose party list WIPO publishes. Every one of those foreign marks was filed directly at the Department through a local representative, because first-to-file here means first at this register, not first anywhere. A brand that is famous abroad has no standing in Nepal until someone files it.

The foreign half is itself lopsided. India, the United States, China and Japan supply most of it, with a long tail of further countries behind them.

It also explains a pattern we see in conflict checks: a Nepali founder picks a name, and the obstacle turns out to be a multinational that filed defensively years earlier and never traded here.

How many owners are behind the applicant rows?

Fewer than the row count suggests. The register holds 28,186 applicant rows but only about 19,900 distinct owners, so the row count overstates the number of owners by roughly 40%.

The reason is mundane. Each row is one name-and-address string exactly as printed, so a company whose address the Department spells slightly differently across filings appears several times. Toyota occupies thirteen rows, Samsung twelve.

This is not a flaw in the Department’s record-keeping. The Bulletin prints what the applicant filed, and two filings years apart will not match character for character. The duplication only becomes a problem when someone counts the rows and calls the total "applicants".

Group the rows by owner name and the most prolific owner in Nepal's published register is ITC Limited, with 683 marks. Quoted off a single row it looks like 186, which is how an under-count becomes a published statistic.

What does the filing-year curve show?

Steady growth with one visible interruption. Entries dated 2018 through 2025 run between roughly 3,200 and 5,400 a year, and 2020 is the trough at 3,233.

The dip is worth noting because it is visible at all: a register tracking real activity should show a pandemic year, and this one does.

The 2026 figure of 3,303 is incomplete, because marks filed this year are still working through examination and have not reached a Bulletin yet. Any year-on-year comparison has to stop a year or two short of the present.

How long after filing does a mark appear?

Across the twelve most recent issues, the average gap from filing date to publication ranged from about 5.5 months to about 15.8 months. Issue to issue, it moves a lot.

This is the single most useful number on the page for planning, and it is why an "annual" view misleads. Applications from one filing year surface across two or three publication years, so filings and publications in the same calendar year describe different cohorts entirely.

For the end-to-end picture, including examination and the opposition period, read our note on how long registration takes. Treat the commonly quoted 12 to 14 month figure as a hedged typical case rather than a promise.

What law sits behind the Bulletin?

The Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act 1965, and four of its sections explain why the records look the way they do.

Sec. 21A(1) is the publication duty: the Department publishes registered designs and trade marks, with their renewals and cancellations, for public information. That is the Bulletin's legal basis, and it is also why a Bulletin entry describes a past event rather than a current status.

Sec. 18A(2) requires a separate application for goods or services in different categories, which is why a single brand generates several rows. Sec. 18D gives a registered mark seven years, and Sec. 23B sets the renewal procedure, so the same mark reappears in much later issues.

Two practical points sit outside the counts. The registration certificate follows the Schedule 2(c) form under Sec. 18, and a notarised power of attorney is expected whenever an agent files, although the Act only grants the right to appoint one, in Sec. 20.

Why does the opposition window matter to the figures?

Because a published mark is not a settled one. Sec. 21A(2) gives 35 days from publication to complain, while Department practice for trade marks works to a 90-day opposition period, and our opposition team works to the longer figure.

Either way there is a window after publication in which an entry can be challenged. A count taken the week a Bulletin appears therefore includes marks that will not survive, which is one more reason to describe these as published rather than registered.

What can this dataset not tell you?

Four things, and knowing them is what separates using the data from misusing it.

It cannot tell you whether a published mark went on to register, because the Bulletin records publication and our extraction carries no status field. It cannot show applications that have not yet published. It cannot show refused or withdrawn applications, which never reach a Bulletin at all. And it cannot settle whether your proposed name conflicts with a published one, which is a legal judgement rather than a database lookup.

How should a business actually use these numbers?

1. Find your class first. The NICE class finder narrows it before you look at anything else.
2. Read the crowding, not the ranking. A large class means more earlier rights, so search harder.
3. Search names, not just your own. Check spelling variants and near-sounding words in the same class.
4. Check who owns the near misses. A dormant foreign registration still blocks you.
5. File before you print. Signage and packaging are sunk costs if the mark is refused.
6. Diarise the renewal term. Our renewal calculator keeps the date visible.

What would this look like for one business?

Imagine a Pokhara company launching a packaged millet snack, an online shop and a café under one name. This is an illustration, not a real case.

The snack sits in Class 30, the most crowded class in the register, so clearance there is the hard part. The shop touches Class 35 and the café Class 43, both thinly populated, where the same name may clear easily. Three classes means three applications and three publications, arriving in different Bulletin issues months apart.

One brand, three legal events, and in any annual count it looks like three businesses. That is the whole argument for reading the record rather than a headline. Our clearance and search service does this class by class.

Common mistakes when reading Nepal trademark statistics

• Treating a published entry as a registration. It is neither a grant nor a status.
• Counting applications as brands. One owner, several classes, several rows.
• Counting applicant rows as owners, which overstates the owner count by roughly 40%.
• Comparing a filing year with a publication year, which are different cohorts.
• Reading a thin class as a safe class rather than an unprotected one.
• Assuming an unfamiliar foreign name is unused and therefore unenforceable.
• Using a database count in place of a real clearance and filing plan.

In short, what does the record say?

Nepal's published trade mark register is a food-and-drink register, four-fifths goods, two-fifths foreign-owned, and concentrated in fewer hands than the row count implies. None of that appears in an official annual report, because there is not one. It is in the Bulletins, and reading them properly is the closest thing Nepal has.

People also search for

• How to search for a trade mark in Nepal
• What the NICE classification is
• Choosing the right class in Nepal
• How to register a trade mark in Nepal
• Why applications get rejected
• Checking name availability
• What counts as confusingly similar

Numbers are a starting point, not a clearance. When you have a name in mind, run it through the conflict checker, read the statutory position at the Nepal Law Commission, and contact our team for a view on your own class and mark.