Increase reflects China's growing international influence
Domestic applications for international patents hit a record 3,826 last year, according to a senior official from the State Intellectual Property Office. The 57 per cent rise over the previous year highlights China's growing global influence.
China has been among the world's top 10 in international patent applications for the past two years. The US topped the list in 2005 with more than 45,000 applications.
Office spokesman Yin Xintian said 210,000 of the 573,000 domestic patent applications the office accepted last year were for inventions, adding that China ranked fourth in the world in the number of applications for such patents after the US, Japan and Europe.
But he admitted that despite a rapid rise in patent applications in recent years, China still lagged far behind developed countries in the quality of applications.
'Although we have accepted a large number of patent applications, the overall quality standards, especially with regards to hi-tech fields, are still not that high,' Mr Yin, director-general of the agency's treaty and law department, told a briefing on China's intellectual property rights protection in Beijing yesterday. 'High statistics are a good thing. [But] we should not blindly pursue the quantity. We must improve the quality.'
Meanwhile, Mr Yin announced that the drafting of the first national strategy on intellectual property rights (IPR) was expected to be finished by June.