MoneyWatch Tech

China Races to Front of Global Patent Activity

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: February 12, 2009 / 10:20 PM EST / MoneyWatch

I'm on a private patent email list run by Foley & Lardner partner and George Washington University Law School Professor Harold Wegner. He was recently digging through patent application statistics from various countries and found that China has pulled far ahead of the rest of the world in patent applications filed.

According to his annualized estimate based on China Patent & Trademark Office numbers for January through November, 2008, the total number of patents filed in China last year is approximately 782,000. Just under 86 percent of them were filed by Chinese companies, with the rest being overseas filings.

To put this into perspective, look at the calendar 2007 numbers from the Trilateral Co-operation, which has statistical information from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Japan Patent Office, and European Patent Office:

USPTO: 456,154
JPO: 396,291
EPO: 140,725

Although calendar 2008 figures are not available, the Japan Patent Office's preliminary count shows that in its fiscal year 2008, there were 378,984 patent filings. In its fiscal year 2008 (ending in September), the USPTO preliminary number of patent applications filed was 496,762. And last year, for the first time, a Chinese corporation, telecommunications company Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., filed the most international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

Given that patent applications from other countries can act as prior art, this is not a case of Chinese companies covering old ground in domestic filings. The degree of activity, and China's important position in the world economy, also suggests that companies' patent strategies will have to shift significantly. An enforceable patent in China will become just as effective a competitive and economic weapon as a patent in Europe, Japan, or the U.S. Prevent a product from being sold in one region, and it could make a company's product strategy untenable.