June 27 (China Daily) --The Hangzhou High-tech Industry Development Zone is focusing on the operations, services and professionals in the intellectual property sector to promote a national experimental area for IP services, local officials said.

The area, the first of its kind in Zhejiang province, was established in the zone on June 16. Gan Shaoning, deputy commissioner at the State Intellectual Property Office, said the high-tech zone has solid foundations for the development of business clusters in the IP services sector.

He said that with Zhejiang developing its e-commerce sector, he hopes the zone will boost IP services for emerging e-commerce industries and promote their internationalization.

Zhou Guohui, chief of the province's IP office, said the high-tech zone has been at the forefront of implementing innovation-driven and IP-related strategies in Zhejiang in recent years.

Research and development expenditure in the zone reached 41.23 billion yuan ($6.27 billion) during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), accounting for about one-third of the total in Hangzhou, the provincial capital.

The zone added more than 44 invention patents per 10,000 people last year, meeting the standard defined by the Ministry of Science and Technology for first-class high-tech parks, Zhou said.

He said the zone should promote the integration of IP services within the development of the sciences, technologies and the economy. It should focus on aspects such as IP operations and training as well as the recruitment of professionals, he said.

Patent filings from the zone hit 10,000 in 2015 and invention patents authorized surpassed 1,000, a record high.

Patent applications from the zone from January to April increased 73.84 percent compared with the same period last year. Among them were 1,824 invention patent applications, a year-on-year rise of 103.12 percent.

According to Zhejiang Daily, the high-tech zone is home to innovative companies such as e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and IT infrastructure products and solutions provider H3C Technologies Co.

H3C Technologies had applied for more than 6,400 patents by the end of March, 90 percent of which are inventions.

The zone has long made IP services a vital focus of regional innovative development. It currently has 59 IP services organizations and 185 investment and financing institutions, providing services such as IP agencies, asset evaluation, patent operations and technological transfers.

It is also a national IP demonstration park approved by the SIPO in February 2013 and the first region in Zhejiang to establish an IP court.