Chinese government subsidies fuel surge in patents but experts warn it’s quantity over quality
- China’s tech giants have been particularly active, with Huawei taking the top spot last year with 4,411 patent applications
- The Beijing government offers as much as 20 million yuan in subsidies for a PCT filing, versus 2 million for a domestic patent
China may have overtaken the US in total number of international patents filed last year, but legal experts warn that much of the growth is being fuelled by state-backed subsidies that could flood the system with cheap patents.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) recently reported that the number of filings by China under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) totalled 58,990 last year, compared with 57,840 from the US. The UN agency also highlighted that China’s figure was a 200-fold increase in just 20 years.
China’s tech giants have been particularly active, with Huawei taking the top spot last year with 4,411 patent applications. And when it comes to blockchain, Chinese internet giants Tencent and Alibaba together accounted for over 20 per cent of patent filings for that technology last year, according to a report by The Block Research.
Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
Doug Clark, IP lawyer from Rouse & Co and adjunct professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said China is unlikely to slow its pace of PCT filings because the country still significantly lags behind the US and Japan in terms of patents filed per capita.
China overtook Japan as the world’s biggest holder of domestic patents in 2010 but, after a realisation that those patents do not hold much value, Chinese policymakers moved to incentivise international patents which are typically subject to much more rigorous examination and hold more value.