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6 December 2017Patents

China accounts for 98% of patent growth: report

A report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has shown that the number of patent applications in 2016 grew by more than 8%, with nearly all the growth coming from China.

The report, "World Intellectual Property Indicators 2017", was released by WIPO today, December 6, and showed that innovators filed 3.1 million patent applications in 2016, up 8.3% in a seventh straight yearly increase.

A total of 240,600 additional patent filings were made in the year, with China accounting for about 236,600 (98%).

“The latest figures charting a rise in demand for intellectual property rights confirm a decade-long trend, where developments in China increasingly leave their mark on the worldwide totals,” said WIPO director general Francis Gurry.

He added: “China is increasingly among the leaders in global innovation and branding.”

For trademarks, there was a worldwide increase of 16.4% compared with 2015, which again was the seventh consecutive year of growth.

A total of seven million trademarks were filed.

The China Trademark Office had the highest volume of filing activity with a class count of around 3.7 million, followed by the US (545,587), Japan (451,320) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (369,970).

Applicants based in Switzerland (77%), the US (46%), Germany (45%), the Netherlands (44%) and Sweden (42%) sought protection in jurisdictions outside their respective home countries. In contrast, some 95% of all filing activity by China-based applicants was in China.

In Syria, there were more than 10,000 trademark applications, compared with just over 1,400 in the Bahamas, 544 in Gambia and 218 in Samoa.

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