China Releases Patent Statistics Report on 10th Anniversary of Belt and Road Initiative
Recently, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Belt and Road initiative, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) released a statistics report on patent filing and granting in China and in other countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative ("BRI countries") over the ten years of 2013-2022 ("the decade").
The report shows that patent filing and granting in China and in the BRI countries have achieved a two-way growth over the decade, during which Chinese applicants have filed patent applications in 50 BRI countries, and the cumulative number of published patent applications originated from China in the BRI countries reached 67,000 with an average annual growth of 25.8%, while the cumulative number of patent grants by the BRI countries to Chinese applicants reached 35,000 with an average annual growth of 23.8%. During the decade, 6,882 Chinese enterprises have filed patent applications in the BRI countries, and the top five in terms of patent filing volume were: Huawei (6,586 cases), Xiaomi (2,807), Alibaba (2,557), ZTE (2,243), and Tencent (2,089), each of which having filed and published more than 2,000 patent applications.
During the decade, 115 BRI countries have submitted patent applications in China, with the number of their patent applications and grants in China reaching 253,000 and 112,000 respectively, and an average annual growth of 5.4% and 9.8% respectively, which exceeded the overall growth of foreign patent applications and grants in China during the same period of 2.9% and 5.6% respectively. The top five BRI countries in terms of patent filing volume in China during the decade were: South Korea (178,000 cases), Italy (24,000), Singapore (15,000), Austria (11,000), and Luxembourg (3,000), which altogether accounted for 91.3% of the patent filings from the BRI countries.
Over the decade, digital technology has continued to be the popular field of invention among the patent filings in both China and the BRI countries, with digital communication (12,000 cases) and computer technology (9,000) together accounting for 31.3% of the total patent filings from China in the BRI countries, and semiconductors (16,000), computer technology (15,000), and digital communication (13,000) made up 27.3% of the total patent filings from BRI countries in China.
On the front of green development and innovation, over the decade, 3,549 Chinese patent applications for green and low-carbon technology inventions were published in the BRI countries, with an average annual growth of 16.7%, and 1,884 patents were granted to Chinese applications in the BRI countries, with an average annual growth of 15.8%. Since 2020, the number of published Chinese patent applications for green and low-carbon technology inventions in the BRI countries has accelerated, seeing an average annual growth of 37.3% in the past three years.
