OHIM celebrates the 15th anniversary of the filing of the first Community trade mark applications.

The Office was established at the beginning of 1996, but the filing date for the first CTM applications was set at 1 April of that year. By that day, a decade and a half ago, around 21,000 CTMs had been received, well in excess of the projected demand for the full year.

Since then almost 320,000 companies or individuals in 190 countries have made 940,000 CTM applications, of which more than 713,000 have been registered, making the CTM a true European success story.