Trademark Filing Trends for Italian Applicants: Domestic vs. Abroad

Using the WIPO Statistical Database's origin-to-destination filing matrix for 2014 to 2024, this analysis looks at:

It's part of a wider look at this same question across a dozen major filing nationalities, covered in full here, if you'd like the broader comparison alongside the Italian-specific detail below.

In 2024, Italian-origin applicants filed 79,853 trademark applications worldwide. Of those, 40,671 (50.9%) were filed only with the Italian national office (UIBM), and 39,182 (49.1%) were filed abroad.

Put another way: for roughly every ten applications an Italian applicant files at home, about nine and a half are also filed abroad, a ratio of 0.96 international filings for every domestic one, close to an even split.

Italy's domestic share has drifted upward over the decade, but slowly and with more back-and-forth than a clean trend line suggests.

Source: WIPO Statistical Database, applicant origin-to-destination office filing data, 2014 to 2024. 

Domestic share rose from 46.5% in 2014 to 50.9% in 2024, but unevenly: the ratio moved above and below parity several times along the way rather than tracking a straight line, dipping as low as 47.0% in 2018 before climbing past the halfway mark for the first time in 2024. Compared to some of its neighbors, Italy's filing behavior looks less like a market undergoing a structural shift and more like one oscillating in a fairly narrow band, with 2024 marking the first year domestic filing has clearly pulled ahead.

Looking at 2024, Italian outbound filings are led by one destination well ahead of the rest:

The EU trademark office alone accounts for roughly 35% of all Italian outbound filings, more than the next nine destinations combined. The US and UK follow at a much smaller scale, and the rest of the top ten spreads thinly across a mix of major economies with no other single destination standing out.

Italy draws a comparatively small amount of foreign filing activity relative to its own domestic volume. Of the 44,393 total applications filed with the Italian office in 2024, only 3,722 (8.4%) came from applicants based outside Italy. The largest foreign filer nationalities were:

China leads foreign filing by a clear margin, roughly three times the next largest source, the United States, though the absolute numbers here are modest compared to some other national offices.

As with other EU member states, this figure likely understates real foreign interest in the Italian market: many foreign businesses seeking protection in Italy do so through the EU trademark at EUIPO rather than filing nationally, since a single EU-wide registration already covers Italy alongside every other member state.

A large pool of outbound filing is only half the picture; the other half is how it's getting filed. Our earlier analysis of Madrid System adoption rates found that the share of total Italian filing activity arriving via Madrid fell over the same period, from 8.0% in 2014 to 4.7% in 2024, roughly halving. Direct filing has grown more dominant in Italy even as the domestic-versus-abroad split itself has moved only modestly.

Italy is a market that spent most of the past decade close to an even split before tipping domestic for the first time in 2024, foreign filing into the national office stays modest (understated by the EU filing route), and Madrid's role keeps shrinking rather than growing. For firms handling outbound work for Italian clients, the EU trademark office covers by far the largest single share of that work, and direct filing is already the strong, strengthening default. Trama's WIPO cost and risk calculator can help size up the Madrid versus direct filing decision for any specific Italy-outbound combination.

For how Italy compares to other major filing nationalities, and the aggregate trend across all of them, see the full WIPO trademark filing analysis.