On Tuesday (March 15th) SEPAM commented: “In the case of China the Employee Inventions Act ensures a huge financial incentive for employees to disclose inventions to their employers. Big firms like Huawei and ZTE are now simply swamped by employee invention disclosures and cannot afford to file applications for everything and certainly not doing so on an international scale. National filings are still useful there to keep other Chinese competitors at arm’s length.China had two companies in the top five applicants for patents last year.”

Yesterday the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) confirmed that under its PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system which protects an invention in 148 countries without immediately conferring a patent – but which is often the prelude to a full patent application – Huawei was the No.1 applicant last year with 3,898 applications.

No.2 was Qualcomm with 2,442, No.3 was ZTE with 2,155 applications followed by Samsung with 1,683, and Mitsubishi Electric with 1,593 applications.

In the country rankings for PCT applications, the USA took first place as it has done for the past 38 years.

Although the USA’s PCT filings were 6.7% lower than in 2014, it had 57,385 PCT applications.

Japan was No. 2 in PCT filings with 44,235, and China was No.3 with 29,846.

The UK was in 7th place with 5,313 applications, with Germany, Korea and France in 4th, 5th and 6th places with 18,072, 14,626 and 8476 applications respectively.