Chinese Inventions Boosted 2015 Patent Applications to New High, Says WIPO

Innovators in China “powered global patent applications to a new record” in 2015, filing more than a million applications for the first time in a single year “amid rising worldwide demand for intellectual property rights that undergird economic activity,” the World Intellectual Property Organization said Wednesday in its annual report on global patent activity. In total, about 2.9 million patent applications were filed globally in 2015, a 7.8 percent increase over 2014, when the number of applications rose 4.5 percent over 2013, WIPO said. It was the sixth straight year of “rising demand for patent protection,” WIPO said. Chinese inventors filed 1.01 million patent applications in 2015, substantially more than those filed by inventors in the U.S. (526,000) and Japan (454,000), WIPO said. But Chinese inventors were “comparatively home-focused,” it said. Only 42,000 of the 1.01 million applications from inventors based in China were for patents outside Chinese borders, “while U.S.-based innovators were the most outward-looking, with 237,961 patent applications filed abroad,” WIPO said. About 1.24 million patents were granted worldwide in 2015, up 5.2 percent from 2014 and the fastest growth rate since 2012, it said. This was due mainly to an increase of patent grants in China, which issued 359,000 patents in 2015 to surpass the U.S. (298,000) as the largest patent issuing office, WIPO said.