Robert J. Sayre Cambridge, MA, United States
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by Robert J. Sayre
The World Intellectual Property Organization has now issued its PCT Yearly Review for 2008. For the uninitiated,the Patent Cooperation Treaty affords an international patent filing procedure providing a single preliminary examination before an applicant needs to branch into national stage filings in the countries and regions of interest.
The chart that I found most interesting was the listing of the top 15 countries of origin (measured by the country of the first named applicant),see below (if the chart is clipped,you can click it to see it in its entirety).Not surprisingly, fast-growing Korea (+12.0%) and China(+11.9%) both increased their filings by double digits (percentage-wise) over 2007.Though I was a bit surprised to learn that the other top-15 country to achieve double-digit growth was Sweden (+12.5%).Filings from the United States, in contrast, dropped by 1.0%.
Also interesting was that Huawei Technologies Co. of China catapulted its way past Philips and Panasonic into the top spot for PCT filings with 1,737 PCT applications filed in 2008 (yep, that's almost 5 new filings for every day of the year).
Finally, the fastest-growing technical fields (by number of PCT applications) were IT methods for management (+22.7% annual growth) and micro-structural and nanotechnology (+20.7% annual growth).
