Madrid international registration is the registration of trademarks among member states of the Madrid union in according with the provisions of the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks or the Protocol to the Madrid on the International Registration of Trademarks.

Since 2021, Trinidad and Tobago, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Jamaica, Chile and Cape Verde have joined the Madrid system. At present, the Madrid system has 112 members, covering 128 countries. These members account for over 80 percent of the world trade and the number still growing.

As one of important ways to protect world trademarks, the Madrid system is a solution aims to registrations and administrations of global trademarks, comparing with the single application, it is cheaper for the cost and convenient to procedures, also, it provides global trademark owners with convenient protection channel. Taking the United Arab Emirates as an example, joining the Madrid system greatly reduces the application cost for applicants who want to carry out trademark protection in the United Arab Emirates. At the same time, they no long need to spend a lot of time and expense to deal with the commercial and consular certificates of trademark agent commission, which provides a convenient way for trademark applicants.

Comparing with single country’s registration, international registration under the Madrid system is cheaper and simple, however, there are certain limitations:

1)  For international registration under Madrid system, there must be a trademark which has domestic basic application or approved for the registration, moreover, applied trademarks must keep the trademark (including the design) completely consistent with the basic trademark of the country of origin, the scope of designated goods/service shall not exceed the designated scope of the basic trademark of the country of the origin.

2)  In most countries, international registration takes long review time than single registration applications.

3)  If a domestic basic application is rejected, revoked, invalid and ultimate failure (within 5 years since the international registration date), then, the international registration will be cancelled （so called ‘center strike’, however, it can be converted to domestic registrations of country/region within a certain period).

4)  Existing member countries are still not comprehensive enough, most South American countries such as Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina are still not the member of the Madrid System.

5)  Most countries do not issue sperate certificates for trademark registrations.

With the increasing demands for Chinese enterprises to go to abroad, the importance of protection to registrations of overseas trademarks is becoming more and more obvious. Registrations of overseas trademark is the path which must be experienced for enterprises who intend to access to overseas markets. Trademark applicants should choose proper way to protect overseas trademark registrations according to enterprises’ actual conditions, so as to escort enterprises’ business in overseas markets and provide right protections.