On January 5, 2017 Conference of National IP Office Head was held in Beijing, with the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) head Shen Changyu addressing a work report named Deepen IP Sector Reform and Strengthen IP Protection and Application so as to Realize Significant Improvement in Building an IP Power Country with All Efforts. The report said that the country had over 3.47 million patent applications in 2016, up 23.8 percent year on year; the number of Chinese international patent applications filed under the World Intellectual Property Organization's Patent Cooperation Treaty hit 40,000 last year.