China recently hit a huge milestone: 1,000,000 patents. In 2012 alone they granted 210,000 patents. What does this mean for China? Basically they are inventing and and innovating -- increasing their competitiveness with other nations and creating jobs at the same time. The 2012 number is a 26% increase from 2011, a significant increase from the year before. However, this still doesn't compare to the numbers that America is producing at 247,713 a year*, and which is still a record year. Overall, we can expect emerging markets to start producing more and more patents and become more competitive as the years carry on. Eventually China will hit 2 million patents, but only time can tell until that will happen -- I predict by 2017.
Here is the link to the original article: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2013-02/27/content_16260248.htm
*http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm
I suppose that booming industries of countries like China and India are going to follow suit in this Patent race. It's remarkable how much China is developing in patent competition. Do you know if their patent process is as stringent as the US?
ReplyDeleteI am not sure about that information, but I can imagine it is pretty strict as well or else there would be many problems.
ReplyDeleteThen again, filing that many patents in one year doesn't necessarily mean that China is more innovative and that they are generating a bunch of radical technology. After all, since patents are legitimized in different countries (where the same patent has to be filed several times in order to be valid, doesn't that mean that companies are moving to China? Thus companies may be filing the same patents just (this time) overseas...
ReplyDeleteVery nice article, Adam. China is definitely growing. I just hope they will be stricter on patent infringement laws in order to discourage companies to do it. That way, Chinese companies hopefully won't spend more on law suits than R&D.
ReplyDeleteHaving 1,000,000 patents doesn't mean they are still inventing anything. I can bet that out of all those patents there will be a rise in patent wars between companies. This is a great fact, and like always China is always finding ways to improve and this could be US also outsourcing jobs to China and filing patents there to sell products there. Similarly to US, China will definetly have a rise in patent trolls.
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