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China Patent Grants up 40%, Filings Up 25% in 2010

By Peter Zura

Not long after the announcement came out that the USPTO granted a record number of patents in 2010, China's SIPO officially announced today that the number of patents granted in China in 2010 was 40 percent higher than in 2009, receiving over 1.2 million patent applications and approving 814,825 requests among them last year. The application number was over 25 percent more than that in 2009.

It's important to note however, that China has three types of patent applications: (1) invention patents, (2) utility model patents, and (3) design patents.  Invention patent applications are equivalent to US non-provisional patent applications, while utility model patent applications (aka "petty patent" applications) do not experience substantive examination.  According to SIPO's statistics, utility model patents and design patents together outnumber invention patents by a 5-to-1 ratio.

On the domestic-vs-foreign front, invention patents accounted for over 85 percent in each year's foreign applications since 2005, while domestic applications for invention patents accounted for 26 percent during the same period.

While details are sketchy at this point, the number of foreign applications for invention patents in 2010 apparently rose about 15 percent from 2009, although the number of approved foreign applications dropped 12.3 percent.

However, domestic applications experienced a large leap -- Chinese applications took over 59 percent of all invention patents granted in 2010. The figure was 50.9 in 2009, exceeding foreign applicants' share for the first time.

This statistic is particularly interesting, since it comes hot on the heels of the Chinese government announcing that the country aims to quadruple both patent applications in foreign countries and domestic patent applications for every one million people. The annual patents transaction financial target is to reach 100 billion yuan (US$15 billion) by 2015.

-- Read SIPO Press Release "China Grants More Patents in 2010" (link)

Visit SIPO's statistics page here (link)

-- See also People's Daily, "SIPO: quality, not numbers, key to patents and innovation" (link)

Full post as published by Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog on January 19, 2011 (boomark / email).