Setting Sail for a New Voyage Towards Professional Excellence and Brilliance
Address Marking the Thirtieth Anniversary of China Patent Agent (H. K.) Ltd.

Zeng Xiangling
General Manager
China Patent Agent (H. K.) Ltd.

On this special occasion marking the thirtieth anniversary of the China Patent Agent (H. K.) Ltd. (CPA), I avail myself of this opportunity to express, on behalf of all my CPA colleagues, my highest esteem and deepest gratitude to our Chinese and international clients, professionals in the same industry, IP experts and scholars, and officials of the related national administration agencies and authorities who have long been cordially cooperating with us and have given us all sorts of support in need.

In China, the cause of IP protection has been developing and thriving along with China' s reform and opening to the outside world, prosperity of her economy, progress of science and technology, and the promulgation, implementation and promotion of the National IP Strategy Outlines, construction and improvement of the IP regime, and accelerated globalization of the world economy. It is just in this thriving time that CPA has come into being, and been undergoing sustainable development and constant consolidation.

Thirty years have passed in a flash, in which CPA advanced regardless of stormy weather. We started from scratch and bravely thrust into a brand new field of endeavor; we once endured tremendous difficulty and hardship in our pioneering days, solely enjoyed the wonderful situation of rapid economic developments and extraordinary market expansion; we took our position with poise in face of rising ferocious competition in the industry, and courageously confronted the bad time of business shrinkage and downturn with persevering innovation and in pioneering spirit. To date, CPA has evolved into one of the very few leading IP agencies in China, characterized by unremitting dedication to the provision of our Chinese and foreign clients with embracive IP-related services, which find no parallel in the country.

In the early days of incorporation, CPA was devoted to, and has been carrying on, the corporate mission to be trustworthy, quality oriented, and efficient in its comprehensive service provision as the norm of the stuff members' ethic conduct and spiritual conviction. For the past thirty years, we have been doing our utmost to meet all our clients' demands for error-free, timely, quality and efficient IP services, representing them in winning numerous important IP lawsuits, producing tremendous good social effect in the industry in China and abroad, and winning praise and esteem for this Firm from interested parties of all kinds.

In 2005, Thomas Freedman, a New York Times columnist，stated, in his book entitled The Earth Is Flat, that he believed that the whole world had been flattened by new technologies and multinational capital into a piece of land without boundary. His idea has been gradually accepted by the international community and testified by the developments of history, and the pattern and scenario of "the flattened earth", with the intellectual property rights acting as the driving force and accelerator of the growth and transition of the global economy, have to date become increasingly visible and significant. In the operation of the mainstream economy, the value, position and function of the intellectual property rights have been increasingly recognized by the international community. Besides, more frequent technical exchange and trade, and cooperation among nations and regions will bring more opportunities for, and pose more challenges on, the future development of the IP agency industry in China.

CPA, with its headquarters based in Hong Kong SAR, main offices of considerable scale respectively in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai, a sub-corporation in New York, and two representative offices, one in Tokyo and the other in Munich, is now capable of providing its clients with comprehensive IP-related legal services through its far-reaching channel and extensive network in China and around the world. CPA is now an IP-related legal firm employing more than 300 patent attorneys, trademark attorneys, attorneys-at-law and patent engineers working in a wide range of technical fields, such as chemistry, pharmaceutics, electronics, communications, and mechanics, to mention just a few. Many of them are renowned experts and experienced attorneys highly proficient in providing comprehensive legal services to our Chinese and international clients in relation to prosecution of patents, registration of trademarks and copyright, Customs recordal of IP rights, patent licensing, technical trade and transfer, and they represent their clients in patent and trademark right affirmation proceedings, infringement litigation, and unfair competition lawsuits. Meanwhile, CPA prosecutes, for its clients, applications for registration of the standard patents, short-term patents, designs and trademarks in the Hong Kong SAR, and has become an important part of the network linking Hong Kong, the mainland, and the rest of the world for the protection of intellectual property rights.

Words have it that detail decides success and failure. CPA now has not only attached great importance to the construction of the macro-strategic corporate system by developing and constantly improving a comprehensive business management mechanism covering, among other things, the quality control system, but also managed to implement them in a practical and effective fashion with the efforts of our staff members at all levels to work in a spirit of being scrupulous about every detail and keeping on improving in their prosecution of cases at hand. As a result, CPA has been doing fine in so many successful cases, and has won steady and continuing trust from our clients in China and the worldwide.

Cherishing the glory and dream and being highly zealous and confident, CPA’s employees were in the past, are now, and will be in the future, fully prepared to calmly face any market changes and challenges to satisfy our clients’ varied service demands, and take pains to solve any difficult legal issues they encounter with intelligence and due diligence.

Standing by the windows of the offices on the twenty-second floor of the Great Eagle Centre situated on the Victoria Bay and enjoying the breath-taking view over the water, I have been lost in a myriad of thoughts. I cannot help contemplating the past, the present and the future of our Firm, which greatly reinforces our sense of achievements CPA has been making for the past thirty years of growth and our sense of pride in the Firm. What’s more, CPA, as part of the national efforts for IP protection in China, is more than ever before aware of our sacred commitments. It is my conviction that all those working with me for CPA share the same feeling, emotion and conviction.

As the largest IP agency in China, CPA will continue to stick to the kernel quality-first conception, constantly pursue excellence and make sustainable development to make even more contributions to the protection of intellectual property rights in China and around the globe.

Furthermore, CPA management and stuff alike will benefit from the dividends of our rapid development. Let's make joint efforts and work diligently to have our dream come true, and embrace an even more brilliant and fruitful future.

This is my thoughts on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CPA.

Happy birthday to CPA!