To look up a trademark owner's portfolio in Nepal, search the owner's name across marks published in Department of Industry (DoI) bulletins, then gather every entry that belongs to them. One owner usually appears under several entries, so the first result is rarely the whole picture.
Key takeaways
- An applicant entry is not an owner. The DoI prints the name and address as given, so one company appears many times.
- In our copy of the published record, more than 28,000 applicant entries resolve to roughly 19,900 distinct owner names.
- Add the entries together or you will badly undercount a portfolio.
- Nepal grants one registration per NICE class, so a single brand can be several separate records.
- A bulletin entry is a snapshot at publication. Renewal, assignment and cancellation happen afterwards and do not rewrite it.
- The name on the record is not proof of entitlement: Nepali courts have cancelled marks registered in bad faith.
What is a trademark owner search?
It is a search that starts from a person or company rather than a brand name. You ask what this party holds, not whether one word is taken.
IP Sewa's owner and applicant search runs it over every mark published in the DoI's Industrial Property Bulletin.
The output is a list of published records. Turning that list into a portfolio is the work this guide covers.
How is this different from checking one mark?
Checking one mark answers a narrow question about that mark. Our guide to checking whether a trademark is registered covers that route.
A portfolio lookup answers a wider one: what does this party actually hold, in which classes, and can they grant or enforce it?
That question comes up in deals, not in naming sessions. It is a due-diligence job.
Why would you look up a whole portfolio?
Because a single record rarely answers the commercial question in front of you.
- Buying a business and testing whether its brands are really its own.
- Taking a licence and confirming the licensor holds what it is licensing.
- Opposing a mark and needing the right party and the right record.
- Sizing a competitor and seeing which classes they have already covered.
- Auditing your own brands before a funding round or an audit.
Who keeps Nepal's ownership records?
The Department of Industry keeps the register and administers trademarks under the Patent, Design and Trademark Act 1965.
It publishes accepted marks in the Industrial Property Bulletin, which is the public face of the system and the source IP Sewa reads.
The register itself is not published online as a live database, and there is no public online status tracker. For anything that matters, the DoI's own record is the answer.
Why does one owner appear many times?
Because the bulletin prints the applicant's name and address exactly as filed, and addresses are written differently each time.
A missing ward number, a spelled-out district, "Pvt. Ltd." against "Private Limited": each variation creates what looks like a separate applicant.
So a portfolio is scattered across entries that a name search returns as if they were different parties.
How many owners are behind Nepal's published marks?
Fewer than the entry count suggests. Across the marks published in DoI bulletins, our copy of the record holds more than 28,000 applicant entries but only about 19,900 distinct owner names.
Around 4,000 of those owners appear under two entries or more. The rest appear once, usually because they have filed once.
The effect is largest at the top. The most-published owner in the record, ITC Limited, holds several hundred marks spread over dozens of separate entries, and no single entry comes close to the true figure.
Nepali filers show the same pattern: a large domestic manufacturer's marks routinely sit across twenty or more entries. Figures are as of our latest bulletin import.
How do you search by owner, step by step?
Search wide, then prune. The risk here is missing records, not finding too many.
- Start from the legal name. Use the registered company name, not the shop sign or the product label.
- Search partial names. Drop the suffix and search the distinctive word on its own.
- Search the brands too. Some filings carry no version of the company name at all.
- Collect every entry. Treat differently written addresses as one owner until you can show otherwise.
- Check the classes. Map what you found against the business with the NICE class finder.
- Note what is missing. A gap in a class the business clearly trades in is the most useful finding.
Which versions of the name should you try?
Try the full legal name, the name without its suffix, any former name, and the founder's personal name.
Then try the Devanagari spelling and obvious romanisations, because Nepali names reach the register in both scripts.
Finally, search the goods wording with goods and services search. A filing you cannot find by name may still surface by what it covers.
What does one published entry contain?
Each entry is a fixed set of fields, printed as the DoI received them. Knowing what each field does and does not prove is most of the skill.
Is the applicant the owner?
Not necessarily. Under Sec. 16 of the Act, title to a trademark comes with registration, so an applicant holds an application and nothing more.
A published entry sits between the two. The mark has passed examination and reached the bulletin, but the registration certificate comes later.
Timing matters too. An unopposed application commonly runs 12 to 14 months end to end, so a mark published recently cannot yet be a registration.
A list of thirty published marks may therefore contain very few registrations.
How does ownership change hands?
Sec. 21D allows a registered mark to be transferred or licensed in writing. A transfer needs a joint application by both sides, after which the DoI records it and reissues in the new name.
That happens in the register, not in the bulletin you are reading. An entry printed years ago still shows the original applicant.
Our guide to transferring a trademark to a new owner walks through the mechanics.
Can the recorded owner still lose the mark?
Yes, and Nepali case law is direct about it. In Kansai Nerolac Paints v. Rukmani Chemical Industries (NKP 2077, Decision No. 10561) the Supreme Court held there is no time limit on cancelling a mark registered in bad faith.
The DoI has taken the same line. It refused local applications over well-known marks in the Virgin opposition on 12 June 2023 and the Holiday Inn Express opposition on 10 July 2023.
A recently published mark may also still be inside its opposition window, which DoI practice puts at 90 days from publication.
So a registration is evidence of a claim, not proof that the claim will survive a challenge.
Is the registration still alive?
Three things can quietly end it, and none of them shows in the entry you are looking at.
A registration runs seven years and is renewable in further seven-year terms. Renewal is due within 35 days of expiry, with a late window after that, and an unrenewed mark is cancelled.
Under Sec. 18C the DoI may also cancel a mark that is not put to use within a year of registration. Our renewal service tracks these dates for owners who would rather not.
What about a foreign owner's Nepal portfolio?
Sec. 21B provides that a mark registered abroad has no force in Nepal unless it is registered here, and Nepal is outside the Madrid System operated by WIPO.
So a global brand may own a great deal worldwide and very little here. Search Nepal on its own merits.
Foreign owners file through a local agent appointed by power of attorney, so an unfamiliar Nepali name on an entry may be the representative rather than the owner.
What can an owner search never show you?
Applications that have been filed but not yet published. They exist at the DoI and appear on no public record, so a portfolio you build today is always slightly behind.
It also cannot show refusals, cancellations, or an assignment recorded after publication.
And it cannot show the marks a business uses without ever filing. Those carry goodwill but leave no trace in the register.
Could the printed entry itself be wrong?
Occasionally, yes, and the DoI says so itself. Bulletins carry a corrections section in which earlier entries are put right.
Reading every issue, we have logged more than 600 corrections across 57 bulletins — wrong application numbers, wrong names, and marks republished with the correct logo.
So if a record looks odd, check whether a later issue corrected it before you build an argument on it.
How do you verify what you found?
Match the question to a source that can actually answer it. Most disputes about a portfolio come from asking the bulletin something it never claimed to know.
| What you need to know | Where the answer comes from | Why the bulletin cannot say |
|---|---|---|
| Did it ever register? | The certificate and the DoI record | Publication comes before registration |
| Is it still in force? | The DoI's renewal record | Renewal happens years later |
| Who owns it now? | The recorded assignment | The entry shows the original applicant |
| What exactly is covered? | The goods and services wording | The class number is only a heading |
| Is anything pending? | The DoI, on enquiry | Unpublished filings are not public |
The application-number lookup is the fastest way to pin an entry down, because a number identifies a record where a name does not.
What belongs in a due-diligence file?
Enough for somebody else to repeat your work. That means the search date, the terms used, and every entry you decided to include or exclude.
Record the application number, class, filing date and bulletin issue for each mark, and flag the ones you could not verify.
Keep the gaps visible. A portfolio note that lists only what exists hides the classes the business has left open.
Those gaps matter because Nepal is first-to-file. An unfiled class is an opening somebody else can take before the current owner gets to it.
Common mistakes
- Reading one entry as the portfolio. The same owner is usually spread across several.
- Treating an applicant as a proprietor. Publication is not registration.
- Trusting an old entry's owner name. Assignments are recorded elsewhere.
- Searching only the company name. Brands are often filed without it.
- Stopping at the class number. Two marks in one class can cover unrelated things.
- Mistaking the agent for the owner. A representative acts for somebody else.
A worked example
This is an illustration, not a real case. A buyer is offered a Pokhara food business whose seller says it owns "four registered brands".
An owner search on the company name returns three published marks. Dropping the suffix returns two more, filed under a slightly different address.
Of the five, two were published within the last year and cannot yet be registrations, and one dates back far enough that its term may have run out.
The buyer asks for certificates and renewal records for all five, and finds the café class was never filed at all.
In short
Search by owner rather than by brand, gather every entry that could belong to the same party, and add them up before drawing a conclusion.
Then verify at the DoI, because a published entry records a moment and not a current state. Start with the free tools and the trademark database, and use search by NICE class to see where the gaps are.
If the answer will decide a purchase or a licence, a professional search and clearance review is the sensible next step, and our opposition and enforcement team handles disputes that follow.
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The statutory text sits with the Nepal Law Commission, and only the DoI can confirm a current record. If you are checking a portfolio before a deal, tell us the owner and what you are buying and we will tell you what the record supports.
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