This blog post takes a look at how a few top companies that the Financial Times identified as “prospering in the pandemic” have treated their trademark portfolios during since March 2020. For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll just look at new applications in the US and EU. This will almost certainly under-count the final numbers from the March – September time period, since sophisticated companies tend to use “stealth” filings in out-of-the-way jurisdictions to get applications on file and trigger the Paris Convention priority period, but stay under the radar.

Tech titans Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Nvidia, and Paypal all had a good number of applications in both the US and the EU. Jurisdiction-specific companies like T-Mobile USA primarily had filings in the US, and Pinduoduo and Meituan Dianping (both mainly active in China) didn’t do much in either market. Tesla, Shopify, and Zoom Video all had fewer filings, but rely largely on their strong house marks more than secondary product-level branding.

These numbers aren’t markedly different from the prior year — a little variation, but nothing more than the usual ebb and flow of product launches would suggest. While these companies have been financially successful in riding out the the pandemic from a profits perspective, they haven’t seen a corresponding boom in trademark filings.