Applications for Three Types of Patents in the First Half Year of 2013 Hit One Million

The State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has received 1,012,000 applications for three types of patents in the first half year of 2013, increased by 18.1% compared with the same period of last year. Among them, the applications for inventions totaled 316,000, the applications for utility model reached 397,000 and the applications for designs totaled 299,000, with a year-on-year growth of 22.5%, 25.6% and 5.7% respectively. The inventions, utility models and designs accounted for 31.2, 39.2% and 29.6% respectively in the total number of patent applications. It shows that the growth rate of patent applications slowed down, domestic applications for inventions grew rapidly, and more than 80% of the domestic invention patent applications were employee inventions.

Among the received invention patent applications, domestic applications totaled 256,000 with a year on year growth of 27.4%, accounting for 81.0% of the total number; applications filed by foreign applicants totaled 60,000 with a year-on-year growth of 5.3%, accounting for 19.0% of the total number. Among the domestic invention patent applications, employee inventions reached 209,000 which accounted for 81.6% of the total number; non-employee invention applications totaled 47,000 and accounted for 18.4%.

In the first half of the year, the SIPO has granted altogether 672,000 patents, increased by 26.8% compared with the same period of last year. Among the patents, 109,000 invention applications, 369,000 utility models and 198,000 designs were granted, with a year-on-year growth of 1.9%, 55.3% and 5.3% respectively. The three types of patents inventions, utility models and designs accounted for 16.2%, 54.3% and 29.5% respectively of the total grants.

Among the granted inventions, there were 73,000 domestic patents, increased by 4.3% compared with the same period of last year, accounting for 67.0% of the total number; and there were 36,000 patents filed by foreign applicants, basically reached the same level of the previous year, accounting for 33.0% of the total number. Among the domestic granted inventions, there were 65,000 employee inventions, equaling to 89.0% of the total number; the non-employee inventions totaled 8,000 which was 11.0% of the total number.

The relevant experts indicated that compared with the same period of last year, the patent applications and grants in the first half year of 2013 showed the following features: the growth rate of patent applications received by the SIPO slowed down obviously, yet domestic invention applications grew significantly, with a year-on-year growth of 5.6%, which was more than 80% of the total number; among the domestic invention applications, employee inventions accounted for more than 80% of the total number. And among the domestic employee invention applications, the application filed by enterprises had stabilized around 70% for seven consecutive years; the grants of inventions had a rather modest increase while the grants of utility models granted grew sharply.

August 3, 2013                    Source: State Intellectual Property Office