Patent and Trademark Filling in China Increased Steadily

In 2006, the State Intellectual Property Office totally received 573,178 patent applications, including patent for invention, patent for utility model and patent for design, which represents a yearly increase of 20.3%. Chinese applicants filed 470,342 applications, which accounts 82.1% of the total applications received. The rest 102,836 applications were filed by foreigners, which accounts 17.9% of the total applications received. Compared with the numbers in 2005, domestic fillings in 2006 increased at 22.8%, which is much higher than 10.4% increase of applications filed by foreigners.

Among the domestic filings, 122,318 applications were filed for patent for invention, which represents a yearly increase of 30.8%. Foreign applicants filed 88,172 applications for patent for invention, which represents a yearly increase of 10.4%. For total applications for patent for invention, domestic filings account 58.1%, increased from 53.9% in 2005.

In 2006, totally 268,002 applications were granted, which represents a yearly increase of 25.2%.

Compared with yearly increase of 34.6% in 2005, increase rate of 20.3% in 2006 may not look so sharp. However, it is worthwhile to mention that since 2000, the patent applications have been growing at the yearly increase rate of 20% on average. The momentum for domestic applicants to file patent applications is stronger than that for their foreign counterparts, especially for patent for invention, which is considered more valuable than other two types of patent.

In 2006, the China Trademark Office received more than 700,000 trademark applications, increased from 664,000 in 2005.