Where US Businesses Expand To (And Why Your Trademark Strategy Needs to Keep Up)

A trademark filing usually happens before a business actually starts operating in a country, not after. That timing is the whole point: most countries outside the US award rights to whoever files first, not whoever used the mark first or built the bigger business. Show up late to a market and you may find your own brand name already registered to someone else, sometimes a competitor, sometimes a squatter who filed purely to sell it back to you.

The chart below tracks US-origin trademark filings at nine major foreign offices, Canada, the EU, Mexico, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and India, from 2014 through 2024.

Canada takes roughly 17% of all US foreign filings, more than any other market, and filings there have grown 118% since 2014. That's not a surprising discovery. It's the predictable result of an open border, a shared language, and supply chains that already run north-south. Every US business expansion playbook starts with Canada.

Which is exactly the problem. When every US company treats a market as the obvious first step, that market fills up fast with registered marks in every category. "Safe" and "uncontested" are not the same thing. If Canada is your first move, the real risk isn't whether you should expand there. It's whether the name, logo, or slogan you want to use is still available by the time you file.

This is the sharpest story in the data, and it's a warning worth repeating to every client with UK sales. For years, a single EU trademark application covered the UK automatically. Then Brexit severed that link, and businesses that had never filed a UK-specific application woke up with no enforceable protection in a market they'd been selling into for years.

US filings in the UK jumped roughly 900% in response, from 1,553 in 2014 to a peak of 19,423 in 2022. That's not organic market growth. That's businesses scrambling to re-secure rights they thought they already had. By 2022, a single country had matched the entire 27-nation EU in US filing volume. The lesson isn't really about the UK. It's that trademark coverage you have today can silently stop existing tomorrow, and the businesses that get caught are the ones treating trademark filing as a one-time task instead of an ongoing part of running the business.

EU filings grew a modest 31% over the same period, the slowest pace of any major market, but that's a sign of strength, not stagnation. American businesses have been building trademark protection across Europe for decades, and the EU trademark system is exactly why: a single application covers all 27 member states at once, one of the most efficient ways to secure a market of roughly 450 million consumers anywhere in the world.

The steady growth reflects a market where the groundwork is largely already done. For a business just starting to expand into Europe, that's good news: the system is mature, well tested, and built for exactly this kind of single-filing efficiency. The one thing worth doing well is the trademark clearance search up front, since a market this well established means checking availability early sets you up to file with confidence rather than facing surprises later.

Mexico's filings hit back-to-back record highs in 2023 and 2024, tracking the well-documented shift of US manufacturing and sourcing closer to home. India is up 112% since 2014, the strongest sustained growth outside the UK, driven by a market of 1.4 billion people and a fast-growing digital economy. Both are genuine growth stories, and both are exactly the kind of market where trademark squatting becomes a real, practical problem rather than a theoretical one.

Fast-growing, first-to-file markets are attractive to squatters for a simple reason: they can see a foreign brand gaining traction, often well before that brand has filed locally, and register it first on the bet that the real owner will eventually pay to buy it back rather than rebuild under a new name. A distributor relationship, a product launch, even local press coverage can be enough to tip off an opportunistic filer. The businesses that avoid this problem are the ones that file before any of that visibility happens, not after.

The pattern across every market is the same: trademark protection works when it's timed ahead of the business, not behind it. Before you expand:

If expansion is a real possibility on your roadmap, the filing decision is worth making now, before another business makes it for you.