Geneva, Switzerland:
China, which final year overtook the United States as the world’s top rated filer of international patents, a essential measure of technical innovation, enhanced its lead drastically in 2020, the UN stated Tuesday.
Even as COVID-19 took a vast human and financial toll, international patent applications continued to develop strongly, with China top powerful gains from Asia.
A record 275,900 international patents had been filed in 2020, marking a 4-% hike more than 2019, the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organisation stated in its annual report.
“Innovation remains resilient,” WIPO chief Daren Tang told reporters.
He stressed although that the filings in 2020 mostly reflected innovations and inventions created prior to the pandemic, considering the fact that it requires about a year for applications to make their techniques by way of the program.
But the development in patent filings need to nevertheless be noticed as a positive signal, according to WIPO.
“The fact that there wasn’t a sharp cut-back in international patenting suggests that companies continued to invest in the commercialisation of their technologies during the pandemic,” WIPO chief economist Carsten Fink told reporters.
By comparison, he stated, international patent filings plunged practically 5 % through the international economic crisis in 2009.
“Very high” China development
WIPO’s complicated program of registering international patents includes many categories.
In the most important category — the Patent Cooperation Treaty, or PCT — China remained at the top rated of the ranking with 68,720 filings.
That marks a jump of more than 16 % from 2019, when China passed the United States.
At that point, it was ahead by just more than 1,000 applications but it has now expanded its lead to practically 10,000.
In 2000, China created just 782 international patent filings.
“The growth rate in international patent applications from China has been very high,” Fink stated.
The United States meanwhile also enhanced its international filings, by 3 %, to 59,230.
China and the United States had been followed by Japan, South Korea and Germany as the world’s top rated patent filers, WIPO stated.
The United Nations agency highlighted substantial development in applications by various smaller sized filers as effectively.
Saudi Arabia, for instance, saw its international patent applications balloon final year by more than 73 % to 956, though Malaysia, Chile, Singapore and Brazil also created major advances.
WIPO’s report showed Asian-based applicants accounted for 53.7 % of all filings, up from 35.7 % a decade ago.
For the fourth consecutive year, China-based telecoms giant Huawei Technologies topped the international ranking in 2020, with 5,464 PCT applications.
It was followed by Samsung Electronics of South Korea, with 3,093 Misubishi Electric Corp. of Japan, with 2,810 South Korean LG Electronics at 2,759 and Qualcomm of the United States at 2,173.
Computer technologies accounted for the biggest share of published PCT applications, with 9.2 % of the total, followed by digital communications and healthcare technologies.
This is not necessarily linked to the Covid-19 influenced realities of 2020, Fink stated, adding that the 2021 filings need to provide more insight into pandemic-fuelled technologies trends.
“These patents relate to pre-pandemic innovations so this is not a story about how the crisis has affected the direction of innovation,” he stated.
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)