Patents granted in China in 2022

Recently, the website of the China National Intellectual Property Administration ("CNIPA") published the main statistical data of intellectual property for 2022. While few weeks ago we have provided in these pages an overview of the trademark data (see here), this time we have a look at patents data.

Statistical analysis of the number of patents

The total number of patents granted in China in 2022 amounted to 4,323,409 marking a decrease of 278,048 on 2021. Particularly, the number of invention patents granted during the year increased by 102,401 (14.71% year-on-year). The number of granted utility models decreased by 315,835 (10.12% year-on-year). The number of granted design patents decreased by 64,614 (8.22% year-on-year).

All in all, as of December 2022, the total number of valid patents in three categories In China was 17,878,961. See also the chart herein.

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Table 1: Comparison table of patent data from 2021-2022

Export proportion of Chinese products and distribution of overseas patent applications

According to the survey in 2022, the development of oversea patent application of all industries in China is not as good as that of product exporting trade:

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Table 2: Distribution of export products and overseas patents in different industries (unit:%)

In other respect, among the enterprise patentee surveyed in 2022, the proportion of using overseas patents was 2.1%, which was 2.1 times the proportion of licensing or transferring patents to overseas (1.0%).

In addition, according to statistics, we find that the European and American are the main regions for the import of overseas patents and export of Chinese patents:

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Table 3: Regions involved in international intellectual property transfer by enterprises

Tables source: CNIPA 2022 China Patent Investigation Report

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