As the Korean governmental agency primarily responsible for overseeing intellectual property rights (IPRs), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) strives to conduct its intellectual property (IP) administration in accordance with the national paradigm of creative economy, which seeks to foster innovation and new engines of economic growth to drive Korea's future prosperity.

KIPO has put as great an emphasis as possible on further developing its examination services, as well as promoting economic sustainability through a virtuous cycle of IP creation, utilization, and protection. KIPO strengthened our cooperative ties with foreign IP offices and other international organizations.

KIPO aims to provide fast, high-quality, and customer-oriented examination services by continuing to improve examination systems, raise the quality of IP administration, and reduce first action pendency. The average first office pendency in 2019 was 10.8 months for patents and utility models, 6.8 months for trademarks, and 5.4 months for industrial designs.

In 2019, KIPO received a preliminary total of 510,968 applications filing for patents, utility models, industrial designs, and trademarks in 2019. Out of that number, 84,216 applications were filed by residents of foreign countries. 

The number of PCT applications from Korea has continually grown every year. We have the 5th largest amount of PCT applications by country of origin. There were 18,885 PCT applications in total for 2019 which is an 11.1 percent increased from 16,991 applications in 2018. 

The Korean language is also the 5th most commonly used language as an official PCT publication language.

Since the first establishment of a legal system for intellectual property (IP) in the Republic of Korea in 1946, the quantity and range of IP applications have exponentially increased. KIPO registered the first patent registration in 1948 and reached the registration of one million patents after sixty-two years in 2010. In just a few years afterwards, KIPO issued the registration of its second millionth patent by 2019, becoming the 7th country in the world to achieve this milestone. 

For the first time, the total volume of intellectual property right (IPR) filings for a one-year period recorded 510,968 cases in 2019, which is an 6.4% increase from previous year. Additionally, the Korean patent market for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been rapidly growing as the volume of patent application by SMEs have surpassed that of large enterprises since 2015.