Global patent filings fall on weakened demand from China
A 3% decline in global patent applications, the first fall in a decade, was driven by a drop in filings by Chinese residents, according to a report from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Released today, WIPO’s benchmark “World Intellectual Property Indicators 2020” report concluded that weakened demand from China—which accounted for almost half of global patent applications in 2018—had driven down patent filings.
In 2018, China submitted 1,542,003 patent applications. The following year, demand shrunk by 9.2%, down to 1,400,661. However, this is more than twice the amount received by the US Patent and Trademark Office, which ranked second, with 621,453 applications.
Excluding China, global patent filings rose 2.3%. Among the top five offices, the Republic of Korea (4.3%), the European Patent Office (4.1%) and the US (4.1%) recorded growth in applications in 2019.
Among the top 20 offices, 11 had a greater number of patent applications in 2019 than the year prior, with the largest increases seen in Singapore (19.3%), Indonesia (17.7%) and India (7.1%).
“The strong growth seen in India and Indonesia was driven primarily by an increase in resident applications, whereas conversely, a strong growth in non-resident applications was the main driver of total growth in Singapore,” said the report.
In total, offices located in Asia received 65% of all applications filed worldwide in 2019. Asia’s share of all applications filed worldwide increased from 50.9% in 2009 to 65% in 2019, primarily driven by growth in filings in China.
Global patent applications relating to computer technology accounted for 7.3% of all published applications in 2018 (the latest year for which complete data are available due to the delay between application and publication).
Computer technology was followed by electrical machinery, measurement, medical technology and digital communication, with these five fields accounting for 28.4% of all published applications globally.
Gender gap
In 2019, women accounted for 18.7% of all inventors listed in Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications and men the remaining 81.3%. Incremental gains have been made each year, with the proportion of women inventors increasing from 11.8% in 2005 to 18.7% in 2019.
Just under 35% of PCT applications named at least one woman as inventor in 2019, up from 22.6% in 2005. The share for inventors who are men decreased within the same period from 97% down to 94.1%.
Fields of technology related to the life sciences had comparatively high shares of PCT applications with women inventors, said WIPO, adding that women represented more than one-quarter of inventors listed in published PCT applications in the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, food chemistry, organic fine chemistry, and analysis of biological materials.
Within the top 20 origins, China (32.4%), the Republic of Korea (27.3%) and Australia (19.9%) had the largest proportions of inventors who were women in 2019. Japan (10.7%), Germany (10.5%) and Austria (8.7%) had the lowest.
Asia’s dominance
While patent filing decreased in 2019, trademark and industrial design filing activity jumped by 5.9% and 1.3%, respectively.
An estimated 11.5 million trademark applications were filed worldwide in 2019, marking the tenth consecutive year of growth since the end of the financial crisis. However, the increase is “considerably lower than the extraordinary increase of 18.9% seen in 2018 and the even higher one of 30.2% recorded the year before that in 2017”, noted the report.
In 2019, China accounted for 55.7% of the annual increase in global trademark filing activity (measured in application class counts), a decrease from the high shares of between 73% and 84% it comprised each year from 2016 to 2018.
WIPO compares international trademark filings by class count, to take into account offices which permit single-class filings only. As the top filer, China’s class count of 7.8 million was followed by a count of 672,681 at the USPTO.
China and the US have battled it out as the top two offices since the early 2000s but, since 2006, China’s class count has grown from twice that of the US’ to almost 12 times as much in 2018 and 2019. According to WIPO, this is largely due to the high number of trademark applications filed by Chinese residents in China.
Once again, offices located in Asia dominated the number of trademark filings—in 2019, they accounted for 70.6% of all trademark filing activity.
WIPO director general Daren Tang said: "The robust use of IP tools shows high levels of innovation and creativity at the end of 2019, just at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The pandemic has accelerated long-building trends by fostering the adoption of new technologies and accelerating the digitisation of everyday life. Because IP is so connected to technology, innovation and digitalisation, IP will become even more important to a greater number of countries in the post-COVID world."
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