"Nestlé is a brand driven company and, one of its most important assets are its trademarks.

We have more than 28 billionaire brands and Nescafé itself is valued at more than 12 billion US dollars.

The trademark as such when it is registered on the registry without use has basically no value. The value comes with the use of the market place, with advertisement and communication.

The more the consumers prefer to make a conscience choice for a certain trademark the more is the value of the trademark, which of course is very valuable for the company.

The selection of the best route to protect our trademarks is; we find together with the business by defining so-called protection plans. For local trademarks we use the national routes but if but if it is for regional or worldwide projects we always prefer the international registration system which is the Madrid system

The Madrid is very frequently used by Nestlé. It's cost efficient, with minimum bureaucracy, administrative obstacle, no power of attorneys, no agents, it's also easy for renewals, we can do the renewals with a simple, single registration by electronic means, we can ultimately designate countries in the IR registration, and it gives us a certain guarantee that it will be 12 or 18 months we know that an IR in a particular country is subject to a provisional refusal or not; whereas going the national route it may take much longer to get confirmation that an application is majoring into registration.

We have used this system extensively and wish that even more countries will join the Madrid system.

It's the most appropriate filing system for Nestlé projects which are covering more than 2 countries.

I can encourage all companies to use the IR system as much as they can it's flexible, it's cost efficient and it's easy to administrate".