Australia’s brands die at 19 – and almost nobody kills them. They’re let go.
The trademark register is also a death record. We counted every Australian trade mark that proved itself commercially and is now dead. There are 143,809 of them.
In the four industries we opened first, the median age at death is 19, and only 1 in 27 was taken by someone else. 21,489 brands, counted name by name.
Southlume · published 16 August 2026 · data to 31 Jul 2024 · method in full below
The register keeps a death record. Nobody reads it.
Every Australian trade mark is filed in public – every renewal payment, every lapse, every removal, back to 1906. Read as paperwork, it is 2.3 million entries. Read as a record, it is the only complete account of Australian brands being born, proving themselves, and dying.
78% of marks that reach protection are never renewed past their first ten years; this report ignores them. We counted only brands whose owners paid at least once to keep them alive, and which are now dead – 143,809 across all industries. Four industries are opened first: technology, print and publishing, fashion, and education and entertainment. 21,489 dead brands, counted name by name.
Most brands die at 19
An Australian trade mark renews every ten years, for a few hundred dollars. The first renewal, at year ten, is the one that proves commitment. The second, at year twenty, is the one that kills: 5,585 of these brands died at exactly 19 years old – more than died at any other age, and 26% of all deaths in the four industries.
Nearly half of all deaths – 9,841 of 21,489, 46% – land within a year of 19.
19 – 5,585 deaths: the year the second renewal falls due
age at death, years from registration
5,585 of these brands died at exactly 19. The bar in the lume is that year. The second cluster, at 35, is the older law’s clock.
1,758 marks fall outside the frame and are not drawn: 52 died younger than 8, and 1,706 lived longer than 40 – among them the KODAK mark at 118.
The cliff is identical in every industry we opened – technology, print, fashion and entertainment each show a median death age of 19. The cluster at 35 is the older law’s clock: marks filed before 1996 renewed on seven- and fourteen-year terms.
Death waves are birth waves, twenty years late
Because brands die on a renewal clock, the death rate is not really news about today. It is news about two decades ago, arriving on schedule. The register’s biggest recent death wave – 2019 to 2021, 4,109 marks in three years – is the dot-com class of 2000–02 reaching its cliff: 1,153 of those deaths were registered in 2001 alone.
2019–21 · 4,109 deaths: the class of 2000–02 arrives at the cliff
deaths per year
The three bars in the lume are 2019 to 2021. 2024 is a part year, counted to 31 July.
The 2006–09 wave is the early-1990s filing generation arriving; the quiet years 2010–13 mirror the early-90s recession, when fewer brands were born.
Nobody takes them. Owners let them go.
Trade marks can be fought over – a competitor can apply to remove a mark that is not being used. It almost never happens. Of 21,489 deaths, just 798 – 1 in 27 – were removed by anyone at all. 93% simply stopped being paid for: the renewal notice arrived and nobody answered it.
Of those 798, 567 are recorded as non-use challenges and 231 as removals with no ground stated. Either way, somebody had to act – and almost nobody did.
“Removed – renewal never paid” and “expired on its renewal date” are both non-payment; they differ only in the register’s procedure.
A detail the data insists on: brands die on their birthdays. Because renewal falls due on the registration anniversary, marks that expire do so to the day – KODAK’s 1906 mark was registered on 19 July and died on 19 July, 118 years later.
Names you knew, filed under “ceased”
Every row below is a real entry in the register – a brand that lived, was paid for, and stopped. Some marked the end of the brand itself; others are a company quietly letting an old registration go.
| Mark | Held by, at death | Lived | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| KODAK | Kodak Australasia | 1906–2024 · 118 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| WARATAH | InfraBuild Wire | 1918–2022 · 104 yrs | registration merged |
| MECCANO | Meccano | 1912–2006 · 94 yrs | renewal never paid |
| SPEEDETTE | Speedo Holdings | 1932–2022 · 90 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| ST JAMES | David Jones | 1947–2023 · 76 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| IMPS | Imps Footwear | 1946–2012 · 66 yrs | renewal never paid |
| BANDSTAND | Nine Network | 1969–2024 · 55 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| DONKEY KONG II | Nintendo | 1986–2024 · 38 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| RANDOM HOUSE | Penguin Random House | 1991–2019 · 28 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| NOKIA-CONNECTING PEOPLE | Nokia | 1995–2020 · 25 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| MICROPROSE | Atari Interactive | 1998–2018 · 20 yrs | renewal never paid |
| HANDSPRING | Palm Inc | 1999–2018 · 19 yrs | expired on its renewal date |
| HOTWIRED | Advance Magazine Publishers | 1996–2014 · 18 yrs | renewal never paid |
| GEORGES | Walker Corporation | 1999–2016 · 17 yrs | renewal never paid |
| LAUNCH | Yahoo | 1994–2009 · 15 yrs | renewal never paid |
A dead registration is not always a dead brand: global names above may hold other live Australian registrations in other classes. Each row is one specific mark, in the classes this study covers, ending in the register.
Who lets the most brands go
Brand death concentrates. The register’s biggest single undertaker in these four industries is Pacific Brands – the former home of Bonds, Berlei and Hard Yakka – whose entities let 340 once-renewed registrations go across two decades. Kodak’s entities follow with 148, Telstra with 128, IBM with 110, Microsoft with 68.
Portfolio culls like these are routine housekeeping. Brand death in Australia is overwhelmingly an accounting event; the 798 removals are the exception.
Method, in full
Source: IP Australia’s IP RAPID open dataset, weekly refresh, snapshot dated 27 Jul 2026, licensed CC-BY 4.0. All processing was done locally on the published files; the register is the sole source. A brand qualifies as a death only if every condition below holds, applied in order.
| Condition | Marks surviving | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| All Australian trade marks ever filed (standard marks only – defensive, collective and certification marks excluded) | 2,303,726 | – |
| Reached protected status | 1,609,259 | 69.9% |
| Renewed at least once – the owner paid to keep it past its first term. This is the study’s definition of “genuinely commercial”, and it is the condition that does the work | 348,164 | 21.6% |
| Now dead – a terminal status on the register, or a recorded retirement date | 158,275 | 45.5% |
| Dead at least two years (to 31 Jul 2024) – a buffer against administrative resurrection | 143,809 | 90.9% |
| Deep count: at least one current classification in the four industries opened first (technology · print and publishing · fashion · education and entertainment), and carrying an actual word mark | 21,489 | – |
Age at death is measured registration year to death year. Owner names are as recorded at death; IP Australia anonymises individual (non-company) owners in the public data, and those rows are excluded from all owner rankings. Figures 1 to 3 describe the 21,489 deep-count marks – fig. 1 draws the 19,731 of them aged between 8 and 40 – and the 143,809 headline is all industries. The full row-level dataset behind this report is available as a CSV.
Frequently asked questions
Does a dead trade mark mean the brand is gone?
Not always. A company can hold many registrations for one brand and let some lapse in a tidy-up. That is why this report counts registrations, says so, and reads concentrated corporate lapses as housekeeping rather than as brand failure. Where a brand’s only registration dies and the brand vanishes from the market – GEORGES, HOTWIRED, MICROPROSE – the register recorded a real death.
Why do so many die at exactly 19?
Renewal falls due ten years after registration, then every ten years. A brand that passes its first renewal but not its second dies just before its 20th anniversary – recorded at 19 in whole years.
Why only four industries so far?
Depth before breadth. The four opened here had every record read name by name, including the removal of logo-only entries that carry no usable name. The remaining industries – 122,320 more deaths – follow the same method and can be opened the same way.
Can a lapsed name be registered again?
In general, yes – a dead mark no longer blocks a new application, subject to the ordinary tests in trade mark law. That fact is part of why the register’s death record matters commercially, and none of this report is legal advice.
Where does the data come from?
IP Australia publishes the full register as open data (IP RAPID), refreshed weekly and licensed CC-BY 4.0. This report contains data sourced from IP Australia, snapshot 27 Jul 2026. Our counting method is above; anyone can reproduce it from the same files.
Southlume measures things about Australian business that are public but unread. Every figure on this page carries its date and its method, and anyone can reproduce the count from the same files.