The Latest Worldwide Patent, Trade Mark and Design Applications Statistics




















Jane Lambert

Earlier this year the World Intellectual Property Organization published WIPO IP Facts and Figures 2018.  This is a compendium of statistics on worldwide patent, design and trade mark filings.  The headline figures are that there were 3.17 million patent applications around the world in 2017, as well as 1.78 million utility model applications, 12.39 million trade mark applications and 1.24 million applications for the registration of industrial designs. 

The lion's share of those application cams from Asia with 97.1% of the world's utility model, 67.9% of its industrial design, 66.6% of its trade mark and 65.1% of its patent filings.  North America came second in patenting with 20.3% and Europe third with 11.2% but Europe was ahead of North America in trade mark, industrial design and utility model registrations. 

Some 85.1% of the world's 3.17 million patent applications were filed with the world's top five patent offices. China was top with 43.6% of the world's patent applications mainly from Chinese applicants followed by the USA (19.2%), Japan (10.1%), South Korea (6.5%) and the 44 contracting parties to the European Patent Convention one of which is the UK (5.3%).   Of the remaining patent offices, Germany comes top with 67,712 patent applications followed by India (46.682), Russia (36,883), Canada (35,022) and Australia (28,906).  With 22,072 applications the UK Intellectual Property Office does not feature at all in top 10 patent offices.

The world's leading patenting nation is China followed by the USA but when the number of patent applications per country is compared to its GDP, South Korea comes top with 8,601 applications per US$100 billion of GDP followed by China (5,869), Japan (5,264{, Germany (1,961). Switzerland (1,774) and the USA (1,664).  The UK is not even listed in that table.

With 5,589 world patent applications, the UK is the seventh largest user of the Patent Cooperation Treaty system behind the USA (56,680), China (48,900), Japan (48,206), Germany (18,948), South Korea (15,752) and France (8,013).  This country is followed closely by Switzerland with an eighth of its population (4,485) and the Netherlands with a third (4,430).  The top five applicants were Huawei with 4,024 applications, ZTE with 2,965, Intel (2,637), Mitsubishi (2,521) and Qualcomm (2,163).

On branding, the UK was the fifth biggest user of the Madrid system for the filing of trade marks with 3,297 international trade mark applications behind the USA (7,889), Germany (7,319), China (6,066) and France (4,260).  The UK was not one of the top 10 users of the Hague international design registration system but it did rank tenth in the number of registered design applications per US$100 billion of GDP.  Ahead of the UK were South Korea (3,265), China (2,878), Turkey (1,938), Italy (1,805), Germany (1,663), Spain (1,586), Ukraine (1,473), Iran (1,150) and Switzerland (887).

Anyone wishing to discuss this article or IP generally may call me on 020 7404 5252 during office hours or send me a message through my contact form.

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