Vietnam: Two-year period too long for intellectual-property registration process

• Jun 28, 2021

Chairman of Pacific Foods Le Ba Linh worked very hard for eight years to bring the traditional Vietnamese fish sauce bottle to Amazon. As an exporting company, the boss of Pacific Foods attached importance to intellectual property registration and trademark protection very early.

“When selling their products on Amazon, businesses are required to have intellectual property registration, transparent trademark. Without these factors, they cannot carry out marketing and promotion programs,” said Linh. He said that without registration of intellectual property, businesses selling goods on Amazon are like “hired sellers”.

“Without registered intellectual property, Vietnamese fish sauce ranked over 2,000th. After registering intellectual property, we did marketing campaigns and our product gradually moved up and officially reached Top 1 on Amazon in April 2020,” Lin said.

In early 2020, the Covid-19 epidemic broke out and directly affected traditional retail channels and businesses immediately promoted the online sales channel, including Amazon. Currently, about 18,000 bottles of Vietnamese traditional fish sauce are sold each month on this giant e-commerce platform, leaving behind the fish sauce products of strong competitors from Thailand, Taiwan, China or Singapore.

The sale of Pacific Foods’ fish sauce on Amazon rose from 0% in 2018 to 2,590% in mid-April 2020.

In Vietnam, many experts believe that Vietnamese businesses need to pay attention to the brand.

“If a company has a good business orientation, brand recognition is indispensable,” said Vietstar Windows boss Nguyen Ngoc Luan.

However, the domestic intellectual property registration process is very complicated, which takes up to two years. During this time, if the trademark is found to have been used, the intellectual property registration will be refused. That means businesses take more than 700 days to wait for the relevant agency’s decision.

“Our Vietstar Windows brand is an example. State agencies have no interaction with us. All of the registration process was conducted through an intermediary company. We spent a lot of money to market the brand so what would happen if it is not accepted? If not, we will have to wait another two years to develop a new brand before repeating this vicious cycle,” Luan said.

Viet Duc – the owner of a new coffee brand in the market – said he had to live with anxiety during the two years registering his coffee brand. “Waiting for two years is a big risk. We are tired of waiting,” Duc said.

Meanwhile, it took Luan just a week after registering the intellectual property for a coffee trademark in the US to receive a full report from the local authorities on the relevant trademarks for his business to assess legal problems, the possibility of success if a dispute occurs around the category name, owner’s name, duplicate characters in the registered name… If there are no other issues, a certificate of brand protection will be issued to the business within six months.

Mr. Le Ba Linh introduces his company’s traditional fish sauce product to Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan.

Le Ba Linh said that other countries set periods of three months or six months to respond to businesses related to complaints during the process of brand registration, while it takes up to two years to receive an answer for brand registration in Vietnam.

In 2019, through the System of Receiving and Responding to Enterprise Proposals, the Club of Former National Assembly Deputies suggested that the National Office of Intellectual Property of Vietnam (NOIP) should soon improve the registration of intellectual property rights for products and inventions. The waiting time for registration of intellectual property rights of two years is too long, causing troubles and disadvantages for businesses.

Responding to the petition, the Ministry of Science and Technology at that time said that it had directed the NOIP to urgently implement solutions to speed up the processing of applications and shorten the waiting time for registration, such as: reviewing and simplifying the appraisal process, recruiting more staff, improving the capacity of the information technology system, participating in rapid appraisal programs, and purchasing access to specialized data.

Quang Dinh

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/en/business/two-year-period-too-long-for-intellectual-property-registration-process-750821.html