IP Facts and Figures 2020 from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) provides an overview of intellectual property (IP) activity using the latest available year of complete statistics. The figures presented here are drawn from WIPO’s more comprehensive World Intellectual Property Indicators 2020.

IP Facts and Figures serves as a quick reference guide covering four types of industrial property: patents, utility models, trademarks and industrial designs. It focuses primarily on application data, which is the most often used measure of IP activity. Trademark application data refer to class counts – that is, the number of classes specified in applications.

Patents

Patent filings worldwide declined by 3% in 2019 – the first decline since the 2009 financial crisis – whereas trademark and industrial design filing activity grew by 5.9% and 1.3%, respectively.

The top five offices accounted for 84.7% of the world total.

Despite a substantial decrease in filings on the previous year, the office of China still received the highest number of patent applications in 2019.

China in 2019 surpassed the U.S. to become the top filer of international patent applications.

For a third consecutive year, Huawei Technologies was the top PCT applicant in 2019.

The IP office of China received 96.9% of all utility model applications filed worldwide in 2019.

Trademark

Trademark filing activity in China is more than double that of the next nine largest offices combined.

China and the Republic of Korea performed strongly on application class count per unit of GDP.

Industrial designs

The office of China accounted for more than half of all industrial design filing activity worldwide.

China leads the world in the number of designs in applications per unit of GDP.

(Source: WIPO)