China claims patents top spot from US

Rival’s 40-year domination of rankings ends amid surge of new Asian players

China last year became the top source of international patent application filings, surpassing the United States, which held the top spot for more than 40 years, the United Nations patent agency has said.

The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, which oversees a system for countries to share recognition of patents, released its annual report for 2019 in Geneva on Tuesday.

With 58,990 applications filed in 2019 via WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty, or PCT, system, China took the top spot from the US, with 57,840 applications. In doing so, it became the biggest user of the PCT system, which helps incentivize innovation. The US had been the top user of the system since it started in 1978.

Last year, more than half of patent applications (52.4 percent) came from Asia, with Japan ranking third, followed by Germany and South Korea, according to the report.

WIPO director-general Francis Gurry said China in particular has been driving the general rise of Asia as a relatively new player.

“China’s rapid growth to become the top filer of international patent applications via WIPO underlines a long-term shift in the locus of innovation toward the East, with Asia-based applicants now accounting for more than half of all PCT applications,” said Gurry, in a video broadcast on the results of WIPO in 2019.

Gurry noted that in 1999, WIPO received just 276 applications from China.

Addressing a virtual news conference on the same day, Gurry said that China’s rapid emergence was “down to a very deliberate strategy on the part of Chinese leadership to advance innovation and to make the country a country whose economy operates at a higher level of value”.

For a long time, China has been the factory of the world, “but we’ve seen that changed in recent years”, he said.

“We’ve seen a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese leadership to promote the innovation, to promote high-end, high-value industries,” he said.

We’ve seen a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese leadership to promote the innovation.” Francis Gurry, director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization

“It’s a very clear strategy ... and it is working. I would put it down to that broad movement toward becoming a higher-value economy.”

According to the report, Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, with 4,411 published PCT applications, was the top corporate filer for the third consecutive year.

It was followed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp of Japan (2,661); Samsung Electronics of South Korea (2,334); Qualcomm Inc of the US (2,127) and Guangdong Oppo Mobile Telecommunications of China (1,927).

Educational institutions

Among educational institutions, the University of California maintained its top ranking with 470 published applications in 2019. Tsinghua University (265) was second, followed by Shenzhen University (247), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (230), and South China University of Technology (164).

According to the report, a record 265,800 international patent applications were filed last year, an increase of 5.2 percent over 2018.

“Last year was the best year we have experienced in the course of the past decade. In fact, it was the best year we have experienced in the history of the organization,” Gurry said in the broadcast.

“Intellectual property is increasingly at the heart of global competition. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that innovation is not a zero-sum game — that a net increase in global innovation means new drugs, communications technologies, solutions for global challenges that benefit everyone, wherever they live,” Gurry said.