The number of foreign patent filings in China has been rapidly increasing in recent years as the protective environment of Intellectual Property in China is increasingly improved. By the end of September 09, 2010, the State Intellectual Property Office had accumulatively received 1.002 million patent applications from abroad, including 865 thousand patent applications for invention, 16 thousand patent applications for utility model, and 121 thousand patent applications for design.

It is reported that the countries ranking the top four are: Japan, ranking the first by filing 361 thousand applications in China, and the United States, Germany and South Korea which follow Japan filed 242 thousand, 89 thousand, and 81 thousand patent applications in China, respectively. Other countries filing a large number of patent applications in China are sequentially: France 37 thousand, Holland 35 thousand, Switzerland 27 thousand, U.K 22 thousand, Sweden 17 thousand, Italy 16 thousand, and Finland 10 thousand.

(China IP)