Source: China IP News

According to State Intellectual Property Office's (SIPO) press conference for the third quarter of 2017, in the first half of the year, PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) applications received by SIPO climbed to the 20,000 plateau, logging at 21,600 and up 16% year on year. Six provinces (cities), namely Guangdong, Beijing, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Shandong, Zhejiang accounted for nearly 90% of all applications, with Guangdong dwarfing all others at 11,900.

A SIPO principal attributed the rapid growth to the bigger picture of China's exercise of the Venturing Out strategy that led to the boom of a serious number of innovation-driven companies who had a strong will to arm themselves with IPRs for that extra edge in international competition.

In the first half of 2017, China received 565,000 patent applications for invention, up 6.1% and granted 209,000, 160,000 of which were granted to domestic filers and 149,000 of that 160,000 were service inventions, accounting for 93.1%.  As of June 2017, China was in possession of 1,227,000 invention patents (not counting those originated from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan). Every 10,000 Chinese owned 8.9 invention patents with Beijing (85.9), Shanghai (38.4), Jiangsu (20.5), Zhejiang (18.1), Guangdong (17.5), Tianjin (16.5), Shaanxi (8.1), Fujian (7.1), Liaoning (7.0), and Anhui (7.0) taking over the top 10 spots.

Also in the same time span, Chinese nationals filed 2,174 patent applications (already published) in countries along the Belt and Road (exclusive of China), up 17.8% while those countries rendered 2,038 patent filings in China, up 23.2%.