China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) held the third quarter (2019) press conference in Beijing on July 9, releasing statistics concerning patents, trademarks, geographical indications (GI) and layout designs of integrated circuits in the first half. In general, main IP indexes met the expectations, showcasing steadily growth of IP comprehensive strength.

Patent filing structure has been optimized. The first half witnessed 238,000 invention patent applications granted, up 9.9%. Domestic users contributed 192,000, 95.2% or 183,000 of which were categorized as service inventions. China also received 24,000 international applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), up 4.9%. The 22,000 PCT applications filed by domestic applicants logged at 2.8%.

In the first half, 3,515,000 applications for trademark registration were filed, up 67.8%. As of the end of June, China had cumulatively housed 22,743,000 registered trademarks, up 35.3%, with one valid trademark owned by every 5.2 market entities. In the past six months, 2,849 applications for international trademark registration under the Madrid System were filed by domestic users, totaling 35,000 international trademark registrations in force by Chinese applicants.

With regard to GI, there were 229 GI protection products approved, and 116 companies were certified to use the special GI mark on their products in the first half. As of the end of June, there were cumulatively 5,090 GI trademark registrations, 2,380 GI products under protection (including 61 foreign ones), 8,295 companies were certified to use the special GI mark on their products and 24 national GI products protection demonstration areas were set up. In addition, in the first half, CNIPA received 2,904 applications for registration of layout designs of integrated circuits, up 45.7% and dished out 2,487 certificates, up 52%.

It is worth noting, in the first half, China saw drops in invention patent applications (649,000) and trademark registration applications (3,438,000), down 9.4% and 4.1% respectively. According to CNIPA, this was to the result of the measures on optimizing and perfecting high quality development policy system and continuously intensifying comprehensive policy reviews. With quality rated as a priority, quality will find frictions at a relatively high plateau.