The 2013 World Intellectual Property Indicators report released on 9 December 2013. The report indicates that patent filings overall grew by 9.2 percent last year – the fastest growth in the last 18 years. Utility model (UM), industrial design and trademark filings were up 23.4 percent, 17 percent and 6 percent respectively. China has topped the charts when compared to other countries in term of patent and trademark filings last year.
Following a 3.9 percent decrease in 2009, filings began increasing in 2010 (7.6 percent) before rising again in 2011 (8.1 percent) and jumping further in 2012 (9.2 percent). WIPO director general Francis Gurry said that while economic recovery since the 2009 financial crisis has been uneven and has failed to bring down unacceptably high levels of unemployment, “IP filings have increased at a faster rate than before the crisis”.
China is heavily responsible for these figures. For example, in the case of patents, for the first time, Chinese residents filed the most patents worldwide (compared with 486,070 for Japan and 460,276 for the US) while the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) handled 652,777 applications, making it the largest office for the second year running.
In relation to trademarks, the report breaks the figures down into the number of classes specified in applications (class counts). In 2012 there were 6.58 million class counts, representing a 6 percent increase from 2011.Chinese residents filed about 1.58 million class counts, while SIPO received 16.5 percent more applications than last year, though Turkey (24.1 percent) showed the strongest growth of any IP office. Some IP offices in the European Union, for example Italy (8.3 percent) and Germany (6.4 percent), recorded fewer class counts than in 2011.
Industrial design registrations grew by 17 percent compared to 2011, which represents the highest growth “since design count records became available in 2004,” according to WIPO. For industrial designs, the top IP offices were China, OHIM, South Korea, Germany and Turkey. The estimated number of industrial design registrations in force globally amounted to 2.71 million in 2012, with SIPO having the largest number of registration in force.
Australia’s position in the overall IP activity rankings (resident plus abroad; by origin) was a dismal 23rd and well behind countries such as China, United States, Korea, Japan, Canada, Russia and India.