The CIPC API for trademark search

The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) is the South African national authority responsible for registering and maintaining trademarks, patents, designs, copyright, companies, and co-operatives. Headquartered in Pretoria and operating as an agency of the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC), CIPC was created on 1 May 2011 when the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (CIPRO) merged with the Office of Company and Intellectual Property Enforcement (OCIPE) under the Companies Act 71 of 2008. CIPC runs the South African trademark register under the Trade Marks Act 194 of 1993, with a cumulative corpus of roughly 700,000 records dating back to 1916 and approximately 35,000 new applications filed per year — making it by far the largest and most active trademark register on the African continent.

South Africa is one of the most notable absences from the Madrid Protocol. As of mid-2026, the country has still not acceded to the WIPO Madrid system, despite South African Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Trade, Industry and Competition resolving in October 2024 to amend national legislation to allow accession. The Trade Marks Act 194 of 1993 is not fully aligned with Madrid procedures, and accession has been repeatedly delayed to give CIPC time to reduce its examination backlog. The practical consequence for anyone building cross-border trademark workflows: there is no WIPO routing for South Africa, every foreign applicant has to file directly at CIPC, and every status update lives only in CIPC's national register rather than in WIPO's international feeds.

CIPC exposes the register through IPOnline (iponline.cipc.co.za), a registered-user web portal with a free verbal-mark search and per-mark lookup tools, plus a paid special-search service for richer queries. There is no general-purpose public REST API for trademark data — bulk-data access is granted case-by-case through formal CIPC data-purchase requests, and the office has had a long-running history of data-access friction, including a 2014 platform transition that restricted data re-use and ongoing API monitoring constraints. The register is maintained in English (with Afrikaans as a recognised official language for filings), examined under the Trade Marks Act, advertised in the Patent Journal, and open to opposition for three months from advertisement. Signa is building its CIPC connector against the available data-purchase feeds and IPOnline for Q4 2026; on launch it will normalize South African national filings, the Trade Marks Act event vocabulary, and the unique CIPC application-number format into the same canonical schema used for USPTO, EUIPO, and every other office — and serve as the entry point for sub-Saharan African trademark coverage on the platform.