 Rhy charges eich rhaid i fynd o'r newid rhwng. Mae hyn yn ddullion nag i gyfnod y cyfariad, bydd y gwasanaeth a'r rhwng. Rhyw unrhyw sy'n ddraeg, mae'r dyn ni'r ddiw已o cyd-wrdd, wedi eu gweithio yn ei gwasanaeth... wedi eu gwasanaeth a'r gweithio'n ei gweithio. Rhyw hun am rhaid i fynd i gwasanaeth y rhwng yn ddysgu chi'n ddiogel ffordd ar gyfer y maesio cyffredig seeds into different elements of intellectual property, but also to encourage evidence-based policy making or empirically based policy making. This year the report, as you can see, is on brands, reputation and image in the global marketplace. We are very pleased with this report. We are very proud of this report. We think that it contains and as the work done by Caste and to think y cwm nhw i'r gweithio i gyntaf, ac mae'n cyfeirio i'r cwm, rydyn ni'n gweithio i gyd Cysylltiadedd. Mae'n meddwl i'r cyfnodau yn ddiwedd o'r bwysig ffondi, yn rhaid i ddifrwyddon cyfnod nesaf, o'r rhan o'r ddifrwyddau yn ysgrifennu, byddwn ni'n ddiddordeb 500 miliwn yma. I'll come back to that in a little while, but that indication shows that branding investments account for about 25% of all corporate investments in intangible assets, and corporate investments in intangible assets include, as you know, research and development, software design and other matters, but branding up to 25%, which is quite significant. Now, why did we choose to do the report on brands this time? Well, it may be banal to say it, but brands, of course, are an indispensable guide for consumers. They incarnate the image and the reputation of an enterprise, and they are one of an enterprise's most valuable intangible assets or most valuable assets, and they're important signalling mechanisms in the economy, joining consumers and producers. All enterprises, whether small or medium or large, use brands to commercialise their goods and services, so this is something that is totally pervasive in the economy. And trademarks, which are the legal protection for brands or the legal expression of brands, if you like brands of a commercial notion, and trademarks of the legal expression of brands, trademarks are the most, by far, the most widely used form of intellectual property. So clearly it's an important area, but it has not received in the past the same amount of attention as, for example, patents and the relationship between patents and innovation. So we hope that this report will advance our understanding of the economic role in particular and the commercial role of branding. What are some of the report's main findings? Well, we think that the report makes a contribution towards measuring companies' investments in branding. I have already mentioned that, but we think this is one of the contributions that the report makes. It's not an easy exercise how to measure how much is invested in branding. You can't rely only on expenditure on advertising, and on the other hand, you can't spread the net too widely because in a certain sense all corporate communications have something to do with branding, and so you have to find a happy medium in the measurement exercise. But there are three findings, three empirical findings, in the report which we think stand out. And they are, first of all, as I have mentioned, worldwide. We estimate that companies invest $466 billion, US dollars, on branding, and that was those are figures for the year 2011. Secondly, if you were to look at the United States of America, for example, they have figures which are more complete and more full data, and those figures in the US show that investments in branding in the year 2010 amounted to some $340 billion in the US alone. And that's twice as much as previous estimates indicated. And it exceeds, by the way, the amount that US companies invest in research and development or design. And it's about a quarter of their intangible asset investments. And thirdly, we think an interesting finding is that while branding investments correlate generally with level of economic development, we find that the rapidly growing middle income economies, such as China and India, are investing more in branding than the high income countries did when they were at a comparable stage of development. Narswy, let me come to the role of trademarks in this, in particular, as the legal protection of brands or the legal expression of brands. As I said, it's the most widely used form of intellectual property in the world. In 2001, China became the top recipient of trademark filings, the biggest, if you like, trademark office in the world. You can compare that with their achievement of that status in the patent area in 2011. So in branding area, they achieved it in the trademark area much earlier, 2001, compared to 2011. We would point out that trademark demand, that's the number of applications for trademarks worldwide, trebled, sorry, quadrupled over the last 25 years. So the number of trademark applications annually, globally, went up four times over the last 25 years. In 1985, there was just under one million trademark applications filed worldwide in 2011, 4.2 million. And we think there are a number of factors that account for this, and those factors are analysed and discussed in the report. They include internationalisation of brands, growing importance of the service sector, and the risks of brand misappropriation on the internet. Finally, let me just say one word about branding and innovation. The evidence suggests that the companies that invest heavily in branding are often the most highly innovative companies. So branding is a very important element of an innovation ecosystem, a vibrant innovation ecosystem. Obviously, companies can increase the demand for their products through branding, and the report discusses some evidence that shows that branding is one of the most important mechanisms for companies to secure returns on product innovation. I'll stop there, and I would like to hand the floor to Cast and Trink, our chief economist. Thank you very much, Director General. I don't have anything to add on the main findings of the report. Let me just highlight a number of other topics that the report covers, on which we would be happy to elaborate. First, the report offers a review of how globalisation and technology have shaped branding strategies throughout history. Among other things, the report describes how brands more easily transcend national borders, how there's greater brand diversity, more brands from middle-income countries in particular. It discusses how technology has led brands to communicate through an increasing number of interactive channels and how branding is no longer the purview of companies alone, increasingly individuals, civil society organisations, government agencies, nations as a whole. Even us international organisations are taking an active approach to branding. Secondly, the report looks at so-called markets for brands. Think of international restaurant franchises or Disney characters appearing on t-shirts, for example. Through markets for brands, companies can generate new revenues without substantial investments in building or acquiring new manufacturing capability. We look at the limited data available on markets for brands to characterise those markets. Third, the report offers an in-depth analysis of trademark policy, focusing in particular on the design of the trademark registration process, where different countries have pursued different approaches. It points to the possible risk of trademark cluttering, essentially national trademark registries, growing to the point where there is a diminished availability of names and other signs available for new trademarks. It also discusses a number of specific policy choices such as the requirement to use trademarks in commerce, and the extent to which officers substantively examine trademark applications. Finally, the report asks at what point strong brands can raise competition concerns, while strong brand reputation is in most cases consistent with healthy competition and to the benefit of consumers. There are circumstances where competition authorities have assessed the competitive consequences of strong brand reputation and have at times intervened, for example, in cases of mergers and acquisitions. So these are just some of the other elements that are discussed in the report. Let me stop here, but we would be happy to answer any questions you may have on the report. Thank you. Do you have some special statistics about Russia because you are mentioned in China and you are mentioned in India? Another question, you are right that the middle-class, chef, middle-class economies increased from six to nine percent. How do you see the perspectives? Will this share the bigger and faster explanation? First, on Russia, I suppose one thing that we could point to, too, in the data is that in our Madrid system, international trademark registration system, Russia is, and we will verify this, but I am going from memory, the second most designated or the third most designated country. Now what that means is that people applying for trademark protection consider the Russian market to be the third most interesting, if you like, in the world. From memory, I think China is first and the European Union may be second and I think Russia third. We can verify that, but that's some evidence. Do you have other? The data point I can give you, as the director general described, we produced a global estimate of branding investments that relied on data for more than 60 countries. Russia is among them. In the case of Russia for 2011, which is the latest year for which we have available data, we estimate that branding investments amount to 7.5 billion US dollars in Russia. Interestingly, in absolute terms, that is of course less than in the case of China, which is alone explained by the fact that China has a larger economy. But in relation or as a proportion of GDP, it is actually larger in the case of Russia, branding investments account for 0.4% of GDP. In the case of China, the figure stands at 0.3% of GDP, if these numbers are helpful. We would also be able, but we wouldn't be able to do immediately to look at trends in the case of Russia and see how that figure has evolved over time. I think it's a good question and I think that in some sense also highlights the contribution that we try to make in this report. There have been previously estimates out there on advertising expenditure. What we did is to take the investment approach and the investment approach very much asks what kind of expenditure first of all relates to branding and that clearly goes beyond advertising. That includes market research, it includes strategic communication, a number of other components that you would find in the report. Also secondly, we recognize that not all expenditures necessarily have a long lasting impact on how brands are perceived. So we apply certain depreciation methods to really come up with an investment estimate. The reason we do so and that has been done in a number of countries and for the United States so we can do this, that enables us to compare investments and branding to investments and other intangible assets, which give you a sense of how important is branding in terms of all the intangible assets that a company possesses. At least we have learned quite a bit through this exercise. I have two questions. The first one is the issue of non-traditional trademarks. So I looked in the report and I'm not sure I can answer anything on this. So I would like to follow the same trends. That's the traditional trademarks. Are they used the same way? I don't think we have any danger on that. The second question is the difference between GIs and trademarks. GIs being protected for special engineering systems in some countries and certification marks in some other countries. Are there tension between those two? So does the report give any indication of how we are being able to organise? No, it's not a legal report. It's an economic report. So we're not really looking at all the different mechanisms that can be used to provide some legal protection for brands. Trademarks are the main ones. GIs, as you say, are also very important. Company name registration is a form of branding in a certain sense as well. So the purpose of the report is not really legal analysis and looking at the legal impact of the different branding systems. Likewise for non-traditional marks, we haven't really analysed that in detail. Here is a separate area for the same reason that we're really looking at a first analysis of the economic impact and role of branding. Ravish. Sorry, it's a very hard-to-regure report. It takes some time to absorb and comprehend the findings. But I just want to revert to a development which has taken place over the last 24 hours, mainly about the WikiLeaks, the IPR chapter in the TV. And the 87th page or document basically points to most of your sort of treaties and agreements. And I've just read a couple of reports like some of the recommendations. Basically it says that this has a very adverse negative effect on a range of IPR issues, particularly the bad insight, racisms, copyrights. Would you like to reflect on this and what are your ideas? Look, I can't, obviously, because first I haven't seen any draft. It's all on the web. Yes, I know, but I haven't seen any official draft. It's an official draft. What? It was put out by a state? No, put out by a wiki. So I haven't seen any official draft, first of all. And as far as I am aware, states have not chosen to communicate any official draft of the state of the TPP talks. So I'm unable to take official cognisance of the existence of any instrument in the first place. And secondly, this is an arrangement between a limited number of states, all of whom happen to be members of both the multilateral organisation at WIP and the multilateral organisation at WTO. But we have nothing to say about what individual groupings of our member states may do between themselves, obviously. But it's up to them to do, they may do what they wish. And before we would take any position, not that I think that we will be taking any position, but before we could take any position, I think we would need to see what is the officially communicated instrument as agreed, as opposed to a text which is, first of all, not official, but secondly, not agreed. And I think that one of the reasons why states don't necessarily communicate text under negotiation is because they want that liberty to be able to find out test positions before they are able to come to a result about it. So I can't have any position on the contents. But can I just follow up on what you said? Namely, I agree that it's not an official text because it has just been put out by a number of links. But going through the text itself, whatever is official or non-official status, basically what ideas is that there seems to be a move to undermine the minimum common standards that you have at the World Trade Optimisation. Would this cause a problem? Would your own agreements cause increasingly a problem to undermining what are the minimum standards? Well, I can't agree with that characterisation because I haven't taken cognisance of an official text, so I can't agree with the characterisation that you give it. I don't have any comment before we could see any official text. All I would say is that if you look around the world now, the environment for intellectual property is much more complex than it used to be. Much more complex. So if you look around the world, you see very active national agendas. You see very active bilateral programmes. TPP is one such instance. But you also have proposed negotiations for the now I've forgotten its acronym. It's the TPP, what is it? TPP. TPP. Yeah, there we are. There we are. So this is a fact. You have this complexity of the environment now, which you may not have had 20 years ago. And one can ask the question why has this complexity arisen. And one of the reasons is I think because the field of intellectual property is of more importance. It represents greater economic value than perhaps it used to and is more central to the economic system than it used to be. And another reason is because of globalisation. I think states and the enterprises and individuals in states are drawn into much closer relationships, which naturally brings about, I think, a much more complex environment for determining what the rules will be, governing those interrelationships in a more interconnected world. So this is a fact that we have a complex environment now. And this is one feature of it. And our business is the multilateral part of it and not the plurilateral parts, which is the member states business. And then that. We'll be as you go. Ysgwch, Pyrrhyw, o repondr o'n anglais? So what we do in the report, we look at three private estimates of companies' brand values. You know, these are not our estimates. These are values that come from three companies. One is called Interbrand. A second one is called I think Brand Zet and the other one is called Brand Finance. Those numbers, I believe, are in the public domain. You can actually go to the website of those firms and consult which brands are in the top rankings. We mainly do analysis with those rankings. We compare a little bit the methodology that goes into calculating private values of brands. And we analyse, in this case, the list of top 500 brands. How are they distributed across the world? Which countries account for how many brands? And we have here this distinction between high income and middle income countries. I have, in fact, and I'm happy to share that with you. The list of the French brands that have made it into the top 500 rankings with me. Again, these are not our data. We mainly use them to look at the methodology and to compare them. But this isn't the public domain and I would be happy to share it with you. Sibyl? I made two questions. I think you partially answered the first one, which was how do you measure or how do you estimate the brand value when you calculate your table 1, page 9? You just told us that, in fact, this is a measurement done by outside companies, right? Maybe you can explain what factors are involved with that. And I was wondering to what extent, if any, abuse of brands on the internet is a problem in various ways, either registering an internet address with a brand name or fake websites and things like that, do you have any estimates what the losses might be? We don't because it's very difficult to measure that activity. But all of the evidence suggests that it is extremely significant. And what is the evidence? Well, a certain amount of evidence comes from cyber squatting. That is the deliberate bad faith registration as a domain name of a trademark. So that provides some evidence. A certain amount of evidence comes from court litigation. So you see an active amount of court litigation on the use of trademarks or the misuse of trademarks on the internet. There is quite a significant number of cases that deal with this. And a certain source of certain amount of anecdotal evidence comes from what companies are saying themselves. And what they are saying is that this is a very significant problem for them. And it consumes a significant amount of their resources to be able to just undertake monitoring of the use or misuse of their brands on the internet. And maybe on the first question with regard to measuring brand value, I would say that the concept I think is well defined. And I think the idea is quite sensible. You look at a telephone like this that comes with a certain brand. And the idea of measuring brand value is that you compare the price of that telephone to the price of a hypothetical telephone that looks exactly the same, but does not come with a brand name. And based on the price premium that you calculate, you can infer from that what is the value of the brand. And that the company that sells that particular telephone benefits from. So methodologically I think the concept is well defined. The tricky thing is how to estimate that in practice because you precisely don't know the counterfactual. You precisely don't observe the generic telephones that in some sense would provide the benchmark against which you could calculate brand value. Now the various companies that provide these estimates, they rely on various data sources. They look at companies accounts at their statements. They try to infer manufacturing costs and then try to measure value added due to brands. I think some of the companies also rely on consumer surveys and consumer perception of brands and combine that with company data. And really the methodologies differ quite a bit. Interestingly if you look at the overall correlation, the top brands that appear in one list are usually also the top brands that appear in another list. Even if the values are not the same and the exact ranking is not the same. But there is a reasonably close correlation I would say. If you are also in your in depth research at case studies of rapid brand erosion. Well let me put it this way. I think the way I would describe our value added here is the following. In a sense that branding is certainly not a new phenomenon. There are lots of social scientists that have looked at what makes up for brand values, what are effective branding strategies. Companies have gained a lot of experience in that. They specialize consulting firms that stand ready to offer advice on what particular strategies work best. Our focus here is more on let's say the economy wide impact. That's precisely where we feel there is sort of a lack of evidence. What is the economy wide impact of branding? So we see that as our value added and while I'm sure there are lots of interesting things that could be said about brand erosions. We probably would have seen that as a little bit outside the scope of our study. The reason I'm saying is that there is a very well again documented court cases where competitors tried to undermine a brand through dirty tricks or whatever. And in a global marketplace you can see your brand go down the tube fast. I was wondering if you had some anecdotal evidence of that because it is certainly appearing in the courtrooms. Not anecdotal elements. The only thing I can think of in the area of trademarks is this phenomenon of lookalike brands. Companies try to register trademarks and the question is to what extent do they already free ride on existing trademarks. But it comes down then to very specific questions. Is there consumer confusion? Is there an attempt to tarnish someone else's brands? Courts have reached very complex decisions on that and I think this is probably a challenging area for courts and for trademarks law in general. But it's not something we go into in depth. We talk a little bit about questions of for example brand tarnishment in the report but not at great length. Can I say, judging from the evidence on the report, can I say if you want to please your shareholder, we should spend more on branding or advertisement than the research and development? Yes, I'm not sure you can say that. What you can say is that it seems that those companies that are the most innovative spend a considerable amount of money and invest a lot in branding. Which only makes sense, doesn't it? If you want to sell your product, you need to be known. The product needs to be known and it's known by its brand. So it's a fairly natural conclusion that we come to. But what we see is that the size of that investment is significant, very, very significant. Well, I think it's a fair and interesting question and I think the way we approach it in the report is to ask the question, is branding a complement to innovation or is it really a substitute? Can you think of cases where companies instead of investing in innovation and coming up with new products, they mainly try to create an image around a particular product and try to gain a market share that way? Now I would say the overwhelming weight of evidence that we present in the report suggests that the two really are complements. That branding really supports innovation efforts and they're not in direct competition with each other. Having said this, certainly you would find cases, especially in markets for products that are relatively mature and where the scope of technological improvements is more limited. If you think of convenience goods, if you think of chocolate bars, what have you, I think this is the example that is in the report. They are branding obviously gains in relative importance and that's often the case that then companies try to compete based on image. But again, I think the overwhelming weight of evidence that we present in the report really suggests that there is a complementary relationship between branding and innovation. Any more questions? I've got another one. You said complementary branding and innovation, but we're now seeing, I think quite a few cases of regulatory issues moving into the branding area from the tobacco label in court cases in many countries, including Australia. And now other health issues appearing on whether a product has a lot of salt, fat, sugar. So that could radically change the value of a brand depending on the information that's mandated. Did you touch into that? No, we didn't. I admit that there is a large range, I would say, of government regulations, advertising regulations. You mentioned public health regulations that clearly affect how companies can brand, can engage in branding. The focus of this report is to set the scene by talking about branding relatively broadly, presenting branding investments. I think as far as the government regulations are concerned, we really focus on the trademark system here. I fully admit that's only one aspect related to branding. It's probably the aspect that is at the heart of the work that we do at WIPO. But I think to cover all those possible other government regulations would probably require another report. Look, I think it's the different regulatory mechanisms. The idea of trademark protection is to preserve or to give legal protection to distinctiveness. So that there's not confusion in the marketplace between products and between the origins of products. Other regulatory perspectives are different, I think. So, you know, there is no doubt a regulatory perspective on obscenity in branding, for example. But that's not of immediate interest to us because what we're concerned with is simply the mechanism for creating order in the market by distinguishing between different products and different traders and different economic agents.