China surpassed the U.S. as the top source of international patent applications in 2019
Addicted04 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Jane Lambert The most striking slide of Francis Gurry 's Briefing for Member States and Other Stakeholders of the World Intellectual Property Organization which he presented on 7 April 2020 is #16, China surpassed the U.S. as the top source of international patent applications in 2019. Last year China made 58,890 international patent applications compared to 57,849 from the USA and 52,660 from Japan. According to the same slide, the USA made more patent applications than any other country in 2009. China lay a long way behind the USA, Japan and Germany with roughly the same number of applications as South Korea and France. The UK came in #7 with 5,786 international patent applications in 2019 if anyone is interested. That is less than 10% of the Chinese figure. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. I was at a domain ...