According to foreign media reports, the United Nations agency World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said on Tuesday that in the international patent application to WIPO last year, Huawei got more than half of the total number of applications, becoming the leader in Asia.
Huawei submitted 5,405 patent applications last year, up from 4024 in 2017. WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said at a press conference that this set a historical record.
WIPO oversees international treaties on patents, trademarks and industrial designs. The agency’s annual report on patent applications can reflect the early contours of industry trends.
Gully said that of the total number of applications received, applications from Asia accounted for 50.5%.
“Historically, this is very unusual,” he said. “It is an important moment, a very, very important result.”
In 2018, after Huawei, Mitsubishi Electric was the second largest company to file patent applications with the WIPO international patent system, with 2812 applications and Intel again, with 2,499 entries.
Although the number of patent applications in the United States is higher than in any other country, China has experienced a rapid growth in the past 25 years and will top the list this year or next year.
In 1993, China submitted only one patent application to the WIPO system, but by 2017 China submitted more patent applications to the WIPO system than Japan. In 2018, the number of patent applications filed by China against the WIPO system increased by 9.1% to 53,345, while the number of applications in the United States decreased by 0.9% to 56,142.
Among the top 8 companies in the number of patent applications, Asia has six, including China’s ZTE and BOE Technology Group, as well as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics.
China’s university rankings have also risen, with four universities entering the top ten universities for the first time.
In 2018, with 501 patent applications, the University of California is far ahead of the educational institutions, MIT is second, and Shenzhen University and South China University of Technology are ranked third and fourth, Harvard University Fives.
Guli said that Chinese universities benefited from the extreme emphasis on innovation and the commercialization of basic research, and also benefited from China’s opportunity to become the world’s second largest R&D spending country.
He said that China borrowed from the US Bayh-Dole Act. The bill ensures that patents obtained by government-funded research institutes are used, which may have prompted Chinese universities to commercialize their research.
The WIPO report reflects patent, trademark and design applications, and the owners of the application believe that the value of these applications is sufficient to be protected and promoted in overseas markets. Another report released by WIPO in December last year included millions of applications for intellectual property protection that had never been filed internationally.
