Patent application hits record 4,000,000

February 20, 2008

By the end of 2007, SIPO has received more than 4,000,000 patent filings from home and abroad, an increase of 1,000,000 within one and a half year.

The number of received patent filings maintained a rapid and continuous increase in recent years. The first 1,000,000 applications were accumulated in 15 years. The second 1,000,000 were made in four years and two months. It took only two years and three months to realize the third 1,000,000.

An official with SIPO said that the proportion of domestic invention patent filings among the total patent filings has increased remarkably. Domestic invention patent filings accounted for 47.8%, 50.7% and 53.4% of each of the first three 1,000,000 applications respectively. However, it accounted for 60.8% of the fourth 1,000,000 applications. The increase rate of domestic invention patent filings is obviously higher than that from abroad. Take the year of 2006 as an example, the number of domestic invention patent filings increased by 30.8% compared with the same period of the previous year, which is twenty percentage points higher than the invention patent filings from abroad in the same period.