The WIPO recently released a report showing that the number of international patent applications filed through it continued to grow in 2020; China and the United States led the application volume and both achived annual growth.

Despite the impact of the pandemic and global GDP is expected to decrease by 3.5% in 2020, the number of PCT patent applications filed through the WIPO increased by 4% to 275,900, the highest number of applications ever.

China once again is the country with the largest number of applications hitting 68,720, up 16.1% over last year. The United States and Japan ranked second and third with 59,230 and 50,520 applications respectively, followed by South Korea and Germany. The number of PCT applications filed by Asian countries accounted for 53.7% of the total, compared with 35.7% 10 years ago.

In 2020, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. became the largest applicant for the fourth consecutive year with 5,464 PCT applications. In the second place are South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Japan's Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, South Korea's LG Electronics Co., and the United States Qualcomm.

Among educational institutions, the University of California continued to top the list with 559 applications, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked second with 269 applications. This is followed by Shenzhen University, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China. Of the top 10 universities on the list, 5 are from China, 4 from the United States, and 1 from Japan.

In terms of trademark, the United States is still the country with the largest number of applications using the WIPO Madrid system in 2020, with 10,005 applanations, followed by Germany, China, France and the United Kingdom. Among the top 10, China is the only country that recorded double-digit growth in 2020, an increase of 16.4%.

(Source: CHINA Official WeChat Account)