2011 is the first year of 12th Five-Year Plan, during which China's patent examination quality management system and quality assurance system were further enhanced and the examination quality was improved steadily; the public satisfaction continued to improve, reaching the index of 81.5. It can be said that the State Intellectual Property Office has won the "good start" of the first year of "12th Five-Year Plan.
In 2011, the national "12th Five-Year Plan” outline for the first time proposed to in 2015, realize the indicator of 3.3 invention patent owners per 10,000 population; China's Patent Examination Work of 12th Five-Year Plan clearly states that to the end of the five-year plan, the comprehensive patent examination capacity of China shall reach the advanced level of the world's leading intellectual property offices. Facing the new situation, new tasks and new requirements, the relevant departments of the State Intellectual Property Office are committed to aggressive and hard work, successfully completing the objective tasks of the annual patent examination, which can be described as fruitful and of a good start.
According to statistics, in 2011, China's patent applications rose sharply: the State Intellectual Property Office throughout the year received a total of 1.633 million patent applications of three kinds, an increase of 33.6%, consisting of 526,000 invention patent applications, an increase of 34.5%, 585,000 utility model patent applications and 522,000 design patent applications, and 17,473 PCT patent applications.
In 2011, the State Intellectual Property Office throughout the year concluded a total of 271,000 patent applications for invention, eight percent more than planned, 444,000 and 503,000 utility model patent and design patent applications respectively, and 13,000 cases of patent reexamination and invalidation request were examined. As of the end of December 2011, the average substantive examination term of patent applications for invention was kept stably at 22.9 months, 1.3 months shorter than 2010; the average term of concluding utility model patents and design patent applications were respectively shortened to 4.7 months and 2.6 months.
