IPRs: more than 30% of patents worldwide filed in China

While 2016 is coming to the end, statistics in relation to intellectual property rights (mostly in the year 2015) are becoming clearer. China is keeping a prominent role worldwide in terms of the amount of filings but not much in term of internationalization where it is still US and most developed countries to have a balanced account of inbound and outbound intellectual property flows.

About Patent

In 2015, patent applications worldwide rose to nearly 3 million (2,900,000) and one-third of this number (1,010,864) was received by the State Intellectual Property Office of China, making it the first office worldwide to receive more than a million applications in a single year. A detail that draws our attention is that this number almost totals as many applications as the next three offices combined: USA (589,410), Japan (318,721) and Republic of Korea (213,694).

Among the top five offices, China had the fastest growth, followed respectively by EPO, the US and Republic of Korea. The only one which has been seen a decrease is the Japan’s patent office (decrease of 2.2%).

It is worth notice that the US still holds the record of abroad application (237.961) which is much more than China (42.154).

The fields with the highest percentage of published patent applications are respectively: computer technology (7.9% of total), electrical machinery (7.3%) and digital communication (4.9%).

About Trademark

An estimated 6 million trademark applications were filed globally in 2015. Even in this filed the fastest grow this attributable to China market (increased by 15.3%).

A sensitive datum is that around 78% of the worldwide applications were filed by domestic applicants looking for protection inside their own country.

In China only during the 2015, there were around 2.83 million applications counting the highest trademark filing activity in the world. The next four countries or regions on the list are the USA (517,297), the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO 366,383), Japan (345,070) and India (289,843). Around 4.4 million trademark registrations covering 6.2 million classes were recorded worldwide in 2015.

About Industrial Design

Designers across the world filed 872,000 applications during the 2015. Only the China’s office received applications containing 569,059 designs, accounting for more than half of the total, followed by EUIPO with 98,162 and the offices of South Korea (72,458), Germany (56,499) and Turkey (45,852).

The fields with the highest increase of design applications are designs related to furnishings (9.4%), clothing (8.3%),and packages and containers (7%).