China has exceeded the United States in patent filings and is gaining “tremendous ground” as a leader in setting global standards, experts said. The lead in patent filings shifted from the U.S., Japan and Germany to emerging countries, and the “exponential growth” of China was remarkable, Lisa Jorgenson, Deputy Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said at an April 27 virtual conference hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. “We see that Chinese companies, universities and research institutions have become IP owners and users over the last several decades at an almost unprecedented scale. And we believe that this is actually a good thing for the overall IP system,” she said. She illustrated the growth by using the example of China’s patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). In 1995, China filed 97 patent applications. Last year, it filed almost 69,000, Jorgenson said. China was the top user of the PCT by origin last year, having surpassed the U.S. in 2019 and 2020. Huawei was the top PCT applicant last year. Three of the top eight PCT applicants were from China, she added.
“When we look at the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, China is issuing more patents and getting more patents around the world than the United States now,” said Andrei Iancu, former Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In other areas such as publications in peer-reviewed journals and the number of PhD students in relevant technologies, China also has outpaced the U.S., he said. “And it is gaining tremendous ground when it comes to leadership of standards bodies around the world,” he added. Jorgenson said WIPO has been closely engaging Chinese users of the IP system and the organization intends to have future engagement with China. The organization has Chinese staff members and an external office in China to provide global IP and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) services in the country. The WIPO ADR center has handled more than 60 mediation and arbitration cases between Chinese and foreign parties, the China Daily reports.
In particular, the semiconductor intellectual property (IP) sector in China is growing rapidly by the day, with tens of thousands of chip design companies striving for self-reliance amid an ever-escalating China-U.S. tech rivalry and lingering U.S. crackdown. Yue Bin, Founding Partner of Gaorong Capital, said that IP remains an essential part of China's chip design, and the venture capital sector has always given lots of attention to the business. Semiconductor IP provides for reusable design components that can be used to make advanced integrated circuits. According to Mordor Intelligence, the Asia-Pacific is the biggest market for semiconductor IP, with the leading markets being the Chinese mainland, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. About 20,000 to 30,000 chip design companies work in the Chinese mainland, but most of their underlying technologies still rely on licensing from U.S. and European companies, the Global Times reports.
