Applications for international patent filings experienced their fastest growth since 2005 last year, the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported this month, adding that this signals a steady recovery despite difficult global economic conditions.
Last year, 181,900 patent applications were filed under the WIPO-administered Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which facilitates the process of seeking patent protection in multiple countries. This represents an almost 11 per cent growth compared to 2010.
China, Japan and the United States accounted for 82 per cent of the total growth, with the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corporation filing the most applications in 2011, WIPO stated in a news release.
Among the top filing countries, applications from China, Japan, Canada, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the US saw the fastest growth. European countries witnessed a mixed performance with Switzerland, France, Germany and Sweden experiencing growth, and the Netherlands, Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom seeing declines.
Meanwhile, large middle-income economies such as Russia, Brazil and India recorded double-digit filing growth.
WIPO stated that patents related to digital communications amounted to 7.1 per cent of the total filing, making it the field with the largest share of applications followed by electronic machinery, medical technology and computer technology.
Patent applications in selected energy-related technologies
The WIPO report included a sub-section of the development of energy-related technologies containing statistics on patent activity for selected energy-related technologies, namely, fuel cells, geothermal, solar and wind energy.
Total number of patent applications in four energy-related fields
Source: WIPO
The total number of patent applications in the four energy-related fields reached 28,560 in 2009, almost nine times as much as in 1990. Solar energy-related patent applications account for 50.3% of the total in 2009. There was a substantial increase in solar and wind energy patent applications, while those in the field of fuel cell technology saw a small drop in the last two years.
Share of total energy-related patents by country
According to the WIPO’s figures, Japan (34.1%), the Republic of Korea (18.7%) and the US (14%) accounted for more than two-thirds of total solar energy patent applications. However, only the Republic of Korea (1.6%) and China (1.1%) have more than one percent of their total PCT patent applications published in this field.
For fuel cell technology, Japan accounted for more than half of all patent applications in this field. For Japan (1.3%) and Canada (1.0%), more than one percent of their total patent applications are in this field.
Patent applications in the field of wind energy technology are more evenly distributed among several countries, with Germany and the US accounting for a similar share (around 17%). However, only in Denmark (3.1%) and Spain (1.6%) did patenting in this field represent more than one percent of total filings.
The distribution of geothermal energy patent applications is similar to that for wind energy technology. Absolute numbers and relative shares of geothermal energy patents are very low.
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