China has become the main applicant for international patent applications in 2019, claiming the title for the first time in the United States, the UN agency World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said on Tuesday based in Geneva.

"In 1999, the PMOI received 276 requests from China, against 58,990 in 2019, 200 times more today than twenty years ago," said the organization's director general, Francis Gurry. , cited in a press release.

At a press conference, he explained that this new deal reflected Beijing's desire to transform the economy of the Asian giant into "an economy with higher added value", stressing that it was a "system of innovation favored by the State "in which public subsidies play a role.

For the head of the PMOI, "the rapid growth of China to reach the head of the classification […] highlights the shift of the geography of innovation towards the East, the Asian depositors representing now more than half of all requests ", with Europe and North America each accounting for less than a quarter of these requests.

China has thus ended the reign of the United States (57,840 applications in 2019), which dominated the ranking each year since the creation of the WIPO Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in 1978. The two main powers are followed by Japan, Germany, South Korea and France.

Huawei, main depositor

In its annual report, WIPO also notes that for the third consecutive year, the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei Technologies, was the main applicant in 2019, with 4,411 applications published. Next are Mitsubishi Electric Corp. in Japan, Samsung Electronics in South Korea, Qualcomm Inc. in the United States and Guangdong Oppo Mobile Telecommunications in China.

A consolation prize for the United States, the University of California remains at the top of the ranking of educational establishments. It is attended by Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Overall, international patent applications filed through the PCT increased 5.2% (265,800 applications) in 2019, while international trademark applications through the Madrid system increased by 5.7%.

Applications for the protection of industrial designs under the Hague System grew by 10.4%, marking another record year for all of WIPO's global intellectual property services.

Pandemic

It remains to be seen what the impact of the coronavirus pandemic will be on patent applications. Reported in late December by China, the virus has quickly spread around the world, killing more than 73,000 to date and shutting down whole swathes of the economy.

"The impact on the creative industries, on innovation will be extremely important," Francis Gurry told reporters.

Explaining that it was still too early to quantify this impact, which will depend on the intensity and duration of the crisis, he noted that the preliminary data received by WIPO for January, February and March showed a decline in the growth in patent applications.

With AFP

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