Due to the improved climate for IPR protection in China, patent applications from abroad have maintained a rapid growth in recent years. As of September 9, 2010, SIPO had received a total of 1.002 million applications from abroad. In terms of types of patents, there are 865,000 for invention applications, 16,000 for utility models and 121,000 for designs.
The top 4 countries are Japan, the United States of America, Germany and the Republic of Korea with 361,000, 242,000, 89,000 and 81,000 patent applications respectively, followed by France (37,000), Netherlands (35,000), Switzerland (27,000), the United Kingdom (22,000), Sweden (17,000), Italy (16,000) and Finland (10,000). These countries accounted for 90% of the total foreign applications. More than 90% of the applicants are from the enterprises.
According to SIPO, it took about 20 years when the number of foreign patent applications reached 500,000 and the number was doubled to be 1,000,000 within 5 years.
