The long-standing challenges regarding human resources and equipment for examination tasks have yet to be fully resolved, and the lack of professional search tools continues to impact the operations of the Industrial Design Examination Center. However, by closely following the guidance of the Directorate's leadership and fostering a proactive, innovative spirit, the Industrial Design Examination Center has strived to complete a relatively large workload, exceeding the planned targets with the following outstanding results: 

  

Regarding the receiving of applications:  

-              The number of industrial design applications filed with the national system reached 3,222, an increase of 0.4% compared to 2023 (3,210 applications). 

-              The number of international applications for industrial designs under the Hague Agreement designating Viet Nam was 574, an 8.7% increase compared to 2023 (528 applications), including 1,036 industrial designs, up 11.3% from 2023 (931 industrial designs). 

Thus, the total number of the national and international industrial design applications received in 2024 reached 3,796, a 1.6% increase compared to 2023 (3,738 applications). 

  

Regarding the handling of applications:  

The total number of applications that have been processed (including refusal and accepted protection) reached 3,300, a 6.3% increase compared to 2023 (3,104 applications). Among these, the number of applications completing substantive examination reached 3,171, a 12.4% increase compared to 2023 (2,821 applications). However, 2,912 applications have been completed with formality examination, representing a decrease of about 10.6% compared to 3,221 applications in 2023. 

The decline in the number of completed formality examination applications is due to funding difficulties affecting the progress of scanning, processing, and data entry, transferring dossiers between departments, and sending processing results to applicants. 

Overall, despite some limitations in implementation conditions, the examination of industrial design applications basically still met the requirements of quantity and processing progress. All industrial design examiners exceeded labor quotas, including many examiners who handled heavy workloads. In particular, IP Viet Nam applied a variety of measures to handle industrial design applications submitted before January 1, 2023 to improve the situation of deep backlog. 

To achieve the above results, all leaders, officials, and employees of Industrial Design Examination Center have consistently demonstrated enthusiasm, initiative, and creativity in their work. At the same time, they have continuously fostered a spirit of unity, responsibility, and effort to overcome the remaining difficulties and challenges. 

The remedial measures implemented by the Center to address recent challenges include enhancing proactiveness and initiative in work, regularly organizing professional meetings to swiftly reach consensus on complex cases, and improving the application assignment process to maximize the utilization of each examiner, knowledge base, and skills in examination tasks. Additionally, the Center facilitates examiners in conducting simultaneous searches and evaluations of multiple similar applications to reduce search and examination time.  

The Center has also strengthened monitoring to promptly flag delayed or overdue cases, actively adopted operational solution initiatives particularly those already recognized to boost productivity, and implemented reasonable application redistribution among examiners when necessary to minimize processing delays. 

Even though having achieved significant results mentioned above, the handling of industrial design applications still had some problems, such as a backlog of applications from previous years that had not yet been completely resolved and formality examination of a number of industrial design applications did not meet their deadlines in accordance with regulations. One of the reasons for such limitations was a growing workload while the facilities for examination were inadequate. In addition, human resources for the Center had not been timely and fully designated/recruited to replace the employees who retired and resigned during the years. 

In order to maintain and enhance results achieved in 2024 and to solve the remaining problems, in 2025, the Center will execute numerous synchronous solutions, including application of the New Examination Manual of Industrial Design Applications to replace the old Regulation, to update the new provisions of the amended IP Law, Decree No. 65/2023/ND-CP dated August 23, 2023 by the Government and Circular No. 23/2023/TT-BKHCN dated November 30, 2023 by the Ministry of Science and Technology and supplement guidelines on examination of Hague applications designated to Vietnam as well as processing Hague applications of Vietnamese origin. 

Source: Công tác xử lý đơn đăng ký kiểu dáng công nghiệp   

Industrial Design Examination Center