The statistics released by the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) show that for the first time in history, the number of patent applications filed in China breaks 1 million in 2010, which doubled the number 5 year ago. The number of patent granted was more than 700,000 in 2010.
In the previous 5 years, SIPO put it on the top agenda to improve the quality of patent examination. For this purpose, SIPO adopted a series of measures and iestablished a scientific and legitimate management system on patent examination, including quality control, standard development, academic research and education and training. SIPO also focused its attention on strengthening its examination capability through continued effort in the construction of electronic filing system (E system) and patent search and service system (S system) to increase its efficiency and to improve its examination quality.
As a result,SIPO enjoyed a relative high rate of concluding cases for patent examination. In 2007, the number of cased concluded for inventions patent broke 100,000 and ranked No.4 in the world in 2008, 600,000 patent cases were concluded for applications relating to invention, utility model and designs. By the end of October 2010, the total number of cases concluded reached 3.296 million.
In addition, the pendency of examination is also shortened. Now it takes shorter time to conclude the examination. Nevertheless, in 2001, it took 53 months for an invention application to be concluded from the time when it entered into the stage of substantive examination. Now the time is shortened to 24 months in 2010 on a average. Patent applications for utility model are shortened from 9 months to 4 months; applications for industrial designs from 6 months to 3 months in 2010. The efficiency increased the public's satisfaction with the patent examination.
