China gains progress in IP development

BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- China's intellectual property (IP) development has gained progress during the first half of 2023, the country's top IP regulator told a press conference on Tuesday.

In the first six months of this year, China granted 433,000 invention patents, 1.1 million utility model patents and 344,000 design patents, said Hu Wenhui, deputy head of the National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA).

During the same period, China saw 35,000 international applications filed under the World Intellectual Property Organization's Patent Cooperation Treaty.

By the end of June, the total number of valid invention patents in China exceeded 4.56 million, while the number of valid registered trademarks in China was about 44.24 million.

In terms of IP protection, in the first half of 2023, China handled 21,000 administrative adjudication cases concerning patent infringement disputes and started the building of the first batch of 10 national IP protection demonstration zones, according to Hu.

China has seen an increasing number of innovative companies. As of the end of June, the number of domestic companies with valid invention patents reached 385,000, up 60,000 from a year ago. They have registered a total of 2.6 million valid invention patents, accounting for over 70 percent of the domestic total.

China's IP import and export volume also logged steady growth. During the first five months of this year, the import value of China's IP royalties was 120.8 billion yuan (about 16.8 billion U.S. dollars) while the export value was 36.98 billion yuan.

"The latest statistics indicate that China is an important contributor to global innovation in green and low-carbon technologies," said Ge Shu, a senior NIPA official, at the press conference.

He added that Chinese patentees received 178,000 invention patents in green and low-carbon technologies from 2016 to 2022, accounting for 31.9 percent of the global total.

Ge said that NIPA will actively promote the transformation and application of green technology patents to better serve green development.