Sequence matters more than completeness in the first year, because the Paris Convention priority window is six months for trademarks and designs and twelve months for patents, and it cannot be extended.
First, the priority filing. One home or Chinese application establishes the priority date that every later Asian filing can claim. Getting this on file is more urgent than deciding the full jurisdiction list.
Second, the first-to-file exposure. Within the priority window, cover the jurisdictions where squatting risk is highest and where the business will actually trade — in Greater China that means four separate filings, not one.
Third, the manufacturing and transhipment jurisdictions, on the reasoning set out above.
Fourth, defensive scope. Adjacent classes, defensive marks, and Chinese-character or local-script versions of the brand. In China, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand a Latin-script registration alone leaves the local-script version of the brand unprotected, and that is what consumers actually use.
The common failure is not filing too little but filing in the wrong order — spending the priority window deliberating over the full list, and losing it.
