China’s Golden Age of High Patent Application Filings from Overseas Has Gone

View: 1985     Date: 2017-02-14 09:26

In our previous post, we had an overview of the SIPO’s release on its statistics of work in 2016. In particular, China continues its highly increasing trends in both application filing and granting numbers, with over 1.3 million patent applications received in 2016, leading the world on rising demand for patent protection for the sixth straight year. Moreover, the accumulated patent holdings exceed 1.1 million, making China the third country with over one million patents following the USA and Japan.

However, under such numbers, another tiny number may have been neglected by most people. According to the SIPO, the number of patent applications filed by foreign applicants in 2016 decreased 0.1%. Behind that negligible drop is a noteworthy fact that China encountered such decrease for the first time since 2008 the financial crisis spreading all over the world.

In fact, in comparison with the highly increasing filing numbers from home, the contribution from overseas these years only saw a little increase. While the domestic filings with the SIPO increases 920 thousands over the past five years, the overseas counterpart only grew 20 thousands in the same term.

The downward trend is more obvious seen from the data of main contributing countries. As the top one contributor, Japan continued in 2016 its downward trend that started from 2012. Unexpectedly, the U.S. did not continue its growing trend and failed to replace Japan to be No.1, which also began to decrease with even a higher downward rate than Japan.

In contrast, here we take a look at the other four patent offices (i.e. EPO, USPTO, KIPO and JPO) out of IP5 offices regarding their overseas-contributing percentage in the total patent applications they received. Among the IP5 offices, EPO (65%) saw the highest contribution from overseas applicants to its total applications received in 2015, followed by the U.S. (over 50%). The other three offices in East Asia all showed a relatively lower percentage, between 10% and 20%。