With the climate favorable for IPR protection constantly improved, patent applications from abroad maintain strong momentum in recent years. As of September 9, 2010, SIPO had received a total of 1.002 million applications from abroad. In terms of types of patents, there are 865,000 for invention applications, 16,000 for utility models and 121,000 for designs.

The top 4 countries are Japan, the United States of America, Germany and the Republic of Korea with 361,000, 242,000, 89,000 and 81,000 patent applications respectively, followed by France (37,000), Netherlands (35,000), Switzerland (27,000), the United Kingdom (22,000), Sweden (17,000), Italy (16,000) and Finland (10,000).

(China IP News)