On February 24, the State Intellectual Property Office hosted the press conference on granting of invention patents in 2011 in Beijing. GAN Shaoning, vice director of SIPO, attended the conference and gave an introduction of the overall situation of national granted invention patents in 2011.
GAN expressed that China’s IP innovation has made new breakthrough in 2011, according to the press conference. The total of granted invention patents in China amounted to 172,113, up by 27.4% year on year. Among them, the invention patents by patentees in China rose by 6.3 percentage points from the previous year and added up to 112,347, accounting for 65.3% of the total.
The top ten provinces (cities) (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan) listed on the granted invention patents are as follows: Guangdong, Beijing, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shandong, Sichuan, Liaoning, Hubei, and Shaanxi. The top ten cities (excluding municipality directly under the central government) listed on the granted invention patents are: Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Xi’an, Wuhan, Chengdu, Wuxi, and Changsha. ZTE Corporation, Huawei Technologies and Foxconn ranked as the top three enterprises with the most granted invention patents in 2011.
GAN pointed out that there are three main characteristics of the granted invention patents in 2011: firstly, the establishing of technological innovation system in which enterprises play a key role is accelerated; secondly, those granted invention patents are mainly distributed in the fields such as high-tech, modern industry, living and medicine in accordance with national development strategy, thus promoting the economic development and technological innovation transformation, and thirdly, the role that invention patents play in bracing the national economic development is becoming increasingly significant.
By the end of 2011, the valid patents in which the patent technology and market value are both embodied had reached 351,288, surpassing the oversea invention patents in China for the first time. The invention patents per 10,000 people in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan) have reached 237,000, a key step towards the aim of 3.3 invention patents per ten thousand people schemed by China’s 12th five-year plan.
