According to the latest statistics released from the World Intellectual Property Organization, Huawei Technology Ltd. Co., a major Chinese telecommunications company, for the first time, ranks first among all applicants in the world in terms of filing through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Huawei filed a total of 1737 PCT applications in 2008. After Huawei were Panasonic (Japan), Philips Electronics NV (Netherlands), Toyota (Japan) and Robert Bosch GMBH (Germany).
Statistics show that the year 2008 witnessed a total of 164,000 PCT filings, an increase of 2.4 percent over the previous year. The U.S. ranked first in the world with a total of more than 53,000 fillings. Japan and Germany were after US with over 28,000 and over 18,000 filings respectively. Other countries in the top 10 were South Korea, France, China, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.
Rapid increase of PCT filings came from South Korea, China and Sweden, and the growth rate were 12 percent (7908) , 11.9 percent (6089) and 12.5 percent (4114) respectively as compared to the year of 2007.
