China far exceeds its rivals in patent applications
December 19, 2017 Category China News Round-up, Weekly
Driven by burgeoning demand for innovation in China, worldwide filings for patents, trademarks and industrial designs reached record highs last year. The World Intellectual Property Indicators 2017 report, released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on December 6, found that last year China received more patent applications than the combined total from the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Patent Office.
The top five IP offices – the State Intellectual Property Office of China, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office – accounted for 84% of the world’s total patent filings last year, 9 percentage points higher than their combined share 10 years earlier. “Developments in China increasingly leave their mark on the worldwide totals,” said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry. “China is increasingly among the leaders in global innovation and branding.”
China remained the main driver of global growth in patent filings, as applications jumped by 21.5% to 1.3 million. Asia’s share of all patent applications worldwide increased from 49.7% in 2006 to 64.6% in 2016, primarily boosted by strong growth in filings in China, which accounted for around two-thirds of total applications filed in the region. China has been the largest source of patent applications since it topped Japan in 2012. Yet the report noted that around 96% of all applications from China were filed in the country and only 4% were filed abroad. China ranked No 3 for the number of international applications via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) worldwide in 2016, after the U.S. and Japan.
With roughly 3.7 million applications, China was also the largest trademark filer last year, followed by the U.S. and Japan. China accounted for 75% of the annual increase in global trademark filing activity. Applicants from China filed about 1,860 more international applications via the Madrid system in 2016 than in 2015, a surge of 94.7%, which pushed the country up from eighth largest origin in 2015 to fourth largest in 2016, the China Daily reports.
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