In the first half year of 2009, the Chinese Mainland accepted 426,000 cases of patent application, an increase of 23.1% over the same period in last year. Among all the patent application, 375,000 cases came from domestic applicants, an increase of 28.9%, and 51,000 cases came from foreign applicants, a decrease of 7.3%. While in the first half year of 2009, the cases of invention patent application accepted by USA, EU and Japan increase or decrease by 2%, -8.0% and -9.5% respectively.
With respect to the type of cases, among all the patent application cases accepted by the Chinese Mainland in the first half year of 2009, 148,000 are for invention patent, an increase of 12.1% over the same period in last year. The patent application cases for invention, utility model and industrial design respectively account for 34.8%, 33.4% and 31.8% of all cases. Among the invention patent application cases accepted in the first half year of 2009, 104,000 came from domestic applicants, an increase of 22.4% over the same period in last year; 44,000 came from foreign applicants, a decrease of 6.4% over the same period in last year.
With respect to the progress of examination and approval, the State Intellectual Property Office approved a total of 252,000 patent application cases in the first half year of 2009, an increase of 31.3% over the same period in last year. Among all the patent application cases approved, 213,000 are for domestic patent, an increase of 29.9% over the same period in last year; 39,000 are for foreign patent, an increase of 39.3% over the same period in last year. Among all the patent application cases approved, 66,000 are for invention patent, an increase of 57.5%; 92,000 are for utility model patent, an increase of 16.3%; 94,000 are for industrial design patent, an increase of 33.5%.
In the first half year of 2009, the application for and the approval on invention patent present two features: One is that the increase rate of invention patent application in the Chinese Mainland is about 30% higher than that in foreign countries, and the proportion of the invention patent application lodged by domestic applicants exceeds 70% for the first time; the second is that 33,443 invention patents are granted to domestic applicants, accounting for 50.8% of all invention patents granted, and the number of domestic patents approved exceed that of foreign petents approved for the first time.
What seems special is that, the patent application lodged by foreigners in Chinese Mainland decrease for the first time in 2009. This is because that, as impacted by the financial crisis, multinational enterprises decrease the number of patent application and adjust the layout of patent application. In the first half year of 2009, the number of patent application lodged by foreigners in the Chinese Mainland reduced by 7.3%, with a decrease of 29.6% from Korea, a decrease of 8.4% from USA and a decrease of 4.7% from Japan.
The preliminary statistics of USPTO, EPO and JPO reveal that, in the first half year of 2009, the increase in the invention patent application lodged from the Chinese Mainland to these three offices is higher than the increase in invention patent application accepted by these three intellectual property offices, which stays at 2%, -8.0% and -9.5% respectively.
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