HCM City (VNA)🐬 – Trademark registration is important for Vietnamese businesses to protect their trademarks, increase competitiveness with imported goods, and expand their export markets during the integration process, heard a workshop on trademark registration in ASEAN nations in Ho Chi Minh City on July 13.

At the event, experts shared information on legal regulations on trademark protection and registration procedures in Vietnam, and on how to register a trademark in ASEAN nations through the Madrid system, an international system for facilitating the registration of trademarks. Participating enterprises shared their experience as well as difficulties facing them in trademark registration. They expressed their hope for receiving more support and training on intellectual property and to raise their competitiveness during the integration process. Vuong Duc Tuan, deputy head of the National Agency in the Southern Region under the Ministry of Science and Technology, said that there are two ways to register a trademark abroad: direct registration in each nation or registration through the Madrid system which allows businesses to submit only one application for trademark registration in numerous countries. Vietnamese enterprises should speed up international registration to protect their trade names, as in recent times, many of them faced the appropriation of their trade names in both domestic and foreign markets and had to spend a lot of time and money to recall their interests, he suggested. According to Nguyen Minh Duc, Vice Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Intellectual Property Association, the structure of Vietnamese exports to ASEAN is changing positively, in both quality and value. Alongside with crude oil and traditional agricultural products like rice, coffee and rubber, Vietnam has sold consumer and industrial products to regional nations, such as computer components, processed farm produce and cosmetics. As a result, Vietnamese businesses will encounter more violations of intellectual property and unfair competition. Therefore, they should be active in registering property rights for their products, Duc added. In the first quarter of 2016, two-way trade between Vietnam and ASEAN hit 9.74 billion USD, up ten-fold compared with that of 2002.-VNA