Re-register your trademark! Starbucks may kill back to Russia!

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Recently, the media revealed that Starbucks has submitted an application for registered trademark in Russia and may return to Russia soon.

It is reported that Starbucks opened a store in Russia in 2007. Until the outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, affected by Western sanctions against Russia, Starbucks announced in March that it would suspend all commercial activities in Russia, and at the end of May it announced its decision to withdraw from the Russian market and close all 130 stores in the country. and promised to pay six months of wages to compensate local employees.

In July of the same year, Anton Pinsky, founder of Pinskiy&Co, a famous local catering company, partnered with Russian rapper Timati to acquire and take over Starbucks' Russian assets for about 500m roubles ($6 million). Shortly after that, girls in traditional Russian hair ornaments replaced the banshee siren, and the Starbucks-like "Stars Coffee" appeared on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg as a new choice for local coffee consumers.

Three years later, due to the development of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian market may change. Foreign media reported that the newly registered trademarks of Starbucks appeared quietly in the Rospatent database of the Russian Federation intellectual property Patent and Trademark Office.

In fact, as early as the middle of last year, Russian media revealed that Starbucks had submitted a number of trademark registration applications to the Russian Federation intellectual property Office, including "Starbucks Coffee", "Starbucks Frappuccino", and so on. The uses include instant drinks, instant coffee products, and so on. A total of 14 trademark registration applications have been submitted.

According to the latest report, the application for registration of the brand has been under consideration since May 2024 and a registration decision was made on March 4, 2025. Currently, Starbucks has registered trademarks in categories 21, 30, 35 and 43 of the International Classification of goods and Services (ICGS). From this point of view, coffee giants who have closed their shops and evacuated due to the influence of the international situation may return to the Russian market and resume operations in the near future.

However, the news may not be news for Stars Coffee, which replaced Starbucks in Russia. Earlier, the "heir" of the Russian Starbucks store had asked the local court to terminate the legal protection of Starbucks's trademark in order to avoid infringing the US company's trademark in the process of expanding its market layout.

Now that Starbucks has signs of returning to the Russian market, Stars Coffee, which is very similar in products and services, will undoubtedly fall into an awkward position.

Telegram channel "Mash" quoted unnamed sources as saying that someone asked about the possibility of buying back the chain stores sold before Starbucks left Russia, which revealed that the purchase price was about $270 million. But at present, the owners of Stars Coffee have not responded to the news of the sale of the business, nor have they confirmed the online acquisition offer and other relevant information.

In response, analysts at Kokoc Group, a Russian business development platform, said that as the war between Russia and Ukraine drew to an end, as many as 350 foreign companies could resume business in the Russian market. But some political scientists believe that when Western brands return to Russia, they will not be able to develop under the same conditions: the market has been occupied by local manufacturers after the war broke out.

Picture from: network screenshot

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