Companies seem to have overcome nervousness about protecting their inventions in China. The latest data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show an increase of 25.7 per cent per annum in patent applications by foreign companies between 1991 and 2001.
Domestic inventors also became far more active, with an average annual increase in applications of 15.4 pe rcent over the same time.
This represents a big change: the total number of patents filed at the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of the People’s Republic of China was steady between 1987 and 1991, with an average annual growth rate of just 0.22 percent.
In 2001 SIPO received more than 70,880 patent applications, of which 62 per cent were from foreign inventors. A decade earlier 41 per cent of applications were foreign.
Japan, with 23.8 per cent, had the highest share of foreign patents at SIPO in 2001, followed by the EU at 15.8 per cent and the US with 13.7 per cent.
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