Japanese led world in filing of patent applications in 2005

GENEVA (Kyodo) Japan remained tops in the world for international patent application filing in 2005, the World Intellectual Property Organization said in a report released Thursday.

Japan kept its position as the world's No. 1 country under WIPO's Patent Cooperation Treaty with about 427,000 applications, followed by the United States with around 391,000, the U.N. agency said.

Showing its clout as an emerging superpower, China moved up to third place from fourth with a surge of about 33 percent from the previous year to 173,000 applications. It overtook South Korea, which filed about 161,000 applications, the report says.

As for resident applications, China ranked fourth, with a jump of some 42 percent from the previous year to about 93,000, surpassing the three top nations — Japan, the U.S. and South Korea — in terms of pace of expansion.

With the increasing globalization of patent applications, however, the country-by-country ranking alone does not directly reflect prolific production of inventions. The surge in resident applications in China may well indicate the briskness of such activities amid economic expansion in the country, observers said.

While Japan remained on top for resident applications, it fell behind the U.S., China and Europe to rank fourth in terms of applications filed by nonresidents, including foreign companies based in Japan.

Japan stayed closely behind the top-ranking U.S. in terms of the number of applications filed with foreign patent offices, while it maintained its top position in the total number of application filings with domestic and foreign patent offices.

WIPO is a U.N. organization dedicated to promoting the use and protection of intellectual property.