India jumps to sixth position in patent filings

Worldwide intellectual property registrations in 2021 have shown an increase over the previous years. 3.4 million patent applications have been received by various patent offices around the world, out of which more than one-third have been received by the local patent offices of China. Receiving 1.59 million patent applications, China registered an increase of 5.5% over the previous year. USA was a distant second with 591,473, followed by Japan (289200), Republic of Korea (237998) and EPO (188788). Leap frogging of China is highlighted by the fact that if the filings of 2^nd to 13^th country are added up, they match up to the filings of China.

India has also registered an increase of 5.5% in the patent filings over the previous year with the filings totalling about 61000 and claimed sixth position. It is for the first time in the last 11 years that the number of domestic filings has surpassed the number of international patent filings at the Indian patent office in 2021. Though one can take heart from the jump in the filings, there is still a long way to go for catching up the leaders.

Jump in the registration of trademarks was reported by most of countries in 2021. 13.9 million trademark applications were filed worldwide covering 18.1 million trademark classes. Local filings drove the growth in Brazil, India and Turkiye whereas it was foreign filings which spurred the growth in Canada, Switzerland and UK. In Trademark registrations, China again assumed the role of leader with a class count of around 9.5 million, followed by USA (899,678), EUIPO (497542), India (488526) and UK (450815). Offices located in Asia accounted for about 70% of all trademark activity in 2021.

Estimated 1.2 million industrial design applications were filed worldwide in 2021. These applications contained about 1.5 million designs. China office received more than half of the applications filed worldwide. If one considers top 20 offices, strong growth was recorded by UK (+128.5%), India (+67.6%), Mexico (+38.4%) and Türkiye (+38.3%).