Highlights From The 2021 Annual Report

The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) has recently released its 2021 Annual Report. We now summarize some of the key information and statistics regarding patents in the Report for you to have an easy overview of the current state of Chinese patent application and prosecution. Please note that there are three types of patents in China, i.e. invention, utility model and design patents.

Applications

In 2021, the CNIPA received about 1.58 million invention patent applications, an increase of 5.9% over 2020. Among these applications, 90% were filed by domestic entities, and 10% by foreign entities. We note that the number of applications by foreign entities, about 158,000, is very large and continues to grow.