Companies applied for a patent at the European Patent Office (EPO) for a total of 188,600 inventions last year.

After a slightly weaker Corona year 2020, this corresponded to an increase of 4.5 percent - and was a record value.

This emerges from the annually published patent index of the authority.

Ilka Kopplin

Business correspondent in Munich.

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Germany continued to be successful in an international comparison.

Local companies submitted almost 26,000 innovations for patents and thus came in second place.

The United States is the undisputed leader with more than 46,500 inventions, followed by Japan with almost 22,000 applications.

The European market is becoming increasingly important for China

However, the countries showed different dynamics: While the number of patents from America increased by a good 5 percent, that of Japanese companies fell slightly, and applications from Germany remained at the previous year's level.

In contrast, China – meanwhile in fourth place among the nations with the highest number of applications – submitted around a quarter more innovations for a patent last year than in the previous year.

The European market is becoming increasingly important for Chinese companies.

According to the office, the number of patent applications from China has more than quadrupled in the past ten years.

This growth dynamic in China goes hand in hand with the fields in which the companies there are particularly innovative.

Products and technology for digital communication increased last year by 9.4 percent to 15,400 patents and thus led the list of the areas with the highest number of applications.

"In this sector, China is number 1 and a leader," explains Yann Ménière, EPA chief economist, in an interview with the FAZ. It is a very innovative industry that invests heavily in research and development.

For example, the companies are currently working on the new 6G mobile communications standard.

Several corporations develop standards together.

Patents are also there to enable such a division of labor among competitors, explains Ménière.

The companies are also very strong in technologies such as machine learning or in the field of image processing.

"Chinese companies are not only catching up, they are leading," he says.

A look at the companies that have submitted the most patents shows the dominance of Asian companies: Huawei came first with a good 3,500 patent applications, followed by Samsung, LG and Ericsson.

Siemens came in fifth with 1,720 applications, and Bosch came in tenth.

In this country, companies are particularly strong in the fields of electrical machines, devices and energy as well as transport and medical technology, says Ménière.

It is therefore gratifying that a good 12 percent more applications from the computer technology sector were received last year.

Siemens was ranked 7th among the leading applicants in the technology field.

The expert attributes the fact that only around 16,500 patents were approved in Germany last year – and thus almost 18 percent fewer than in the previous year – to a normalization.

For a while, the office was no longer able to process the flood of patent applications quickly enough.

Measures have been taken and therefore a particularly large number of applications have been processed in previous years.

It takes between three and five years for a patent to be approved.