China last year became the world leader in international patent filings, unseating the United States which had held the top spot for more than four decades, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said. A record 265,800 international patent applications were filed last year, up 5.2% from 2018. In the main category – the Patent Cooperation Treaty, or PCT – China topped the ranking for the first time, with 58,990 applications. It overtook the United States, which filed 57,840 applications, and which has led the PCT ranking since the system took effect in 1978. China and the U.S. were followed by Japan, Germany and South Korea as the world’s top patent application filers, WIPO said. “China’s rapid growth to become the top filer of international patent applications via WIPO underlines a long-term shift in innovation toward the East, with Asia-based applicants now accounting for more than half of all PCT applications,” WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said in a statement. Asian-based applicants accounted for 52.4% of all filings, while Europe and North America accounted for less than a quarter each.

For the third consecutive year, Huawei Technologies topped the global ranking in 2019 with 4,411 PCT applications, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp of Japan, which made 2,661 filings, Samsung Electronics of South Korea with 2,334 filings, and Qualcomm of the United States with 2,127. Francis Gurry, who is due to step down at the end of September after 12 years at the WIPO helm, said that back in 1999 the organization had received just 276 patent applications from China. Last year’s nearly 59,000 filings marked a “200-fold increase in only 20 years,” he said. Gurry added: “It is important to remember that innovation is not a zero-sum game. A net increase in global innovation means new drugs, communications technologies, and solutions for global challenges that benefit everyone, wherever they live. I am pleased that WIPO’s IP services are successfully helping foster innovation and spread it worldwide,” the Shanghai Daily reports.

Addressing a virtual news conference, Gurry said that China’s rapid emergence was “down to a very deliberate strategy on the part of Chinese leadership to advance innovation and to make the country a country whose economy operates at a higher level of value”. For a long time, China has been the factory of the world, “but we’ve seen that changed in recent years”, he said. “We’ve seen a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese leadership to promote innovation, to promote high-end, high-value industries,” he said. “It’s a very clear strategy and it is working. I would put it down to that broad movement toward becoming a higher-value economy.”

Among educational institutions, the University of California maintained its top ranking with 470 published applications in 2019. Tsinghua University (265) was second, followed by Shenzhen University (247), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (230), and South China University of Technology (164). According to WIPO’s 2019 report, a record 265,800 international patent applications were filed last year, an increase of 5.2% over 2018. “Last year was the best year we have experienced in the history of the organization,” Francis Gurry said, as reported by the China Daily.