UN says China still top filer of patents

China, which last year overtook the United States as the world’s top filer of international patents, a key measure of technical innovation, increased its lead significantly in 2020, the UN said on Tuesday.

Even as COVID-19 took a vast human and economic toll, international patent applications continued to grow strongly, with China leading strong gains from Asia.

A record 275,900 international patents were filed in 2020, marking a 4 percent hike over 2019, the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization said in its annual report.

“Innovation remains resilient,” WIPO chief Daren Tang told reporters. He stressed though that the filings in 2020 mainly reflected innovations and inventions made prior to the pandemic, since it takes about a year for applications to make their ways through the system.

But the growth in patent filings should still be seen as a positive signal, according to WIPO.

“The fact that there wasn’t a sharp cut-back in international patenting suggests that companies continued to invest in the commercialization of their technologies during the pandemic,” WIPO chief economist Carsten Fink told reporters.

By comparison, he said, international patent filings plunged nearly 5 percent during the global financial crisis in 2009.

WIPO’s complex system of registering international patents involves multiple categories. In the main category, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, or PCT, China remained at the top of the ranking with 68,720 filings.

That marks a jump of more than 16 percent from 2019, when China passed the United States.

At that point, it was ahead by just over 1,000 applications but it has now expanded its lead to nearly 10,000.

In 2000, China made just 782 international patent filings.

“The growth rate in international patent applications from China has been very high,” Fink said.

The United States, meanwhile, also increased its international filings, by 3 percent, to 59,230.

China and the United States were followed by Japan, South Korea and Germany as the world’s top patent filers, WIPO said.