Recently, National Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Science and Technology, and Ministry of Finance of China jointly released Bulletin of China’s Science and Technology Investment in 2013. According to the Bulletin, China dramatically put over 2% of GDP to R&D in 2013, with a yearly increase of 15%. The yearly increasing R&D investment helps improving both patents quantity and quality.
In China, every inventor, scientific research institution or university put large R&D funds to support patent output. For example, Wuhan’s R&D fund in 2013 was 25.5 billion, which took up 2.74% of the city’s GDP, much higher than the national average. Besides, Wuhan applied 9,735 invention patents in 2013, with a yearly increasing of 20.6%.
For companies like Zhongxing, Huawei and Tianchen, which perform well on patents, highly increasing R&D funds help them improving patents application. For example, Tianchen’s R&D fund makes an increasing percentage of sales revenue. Its R&D fund made 10% of 2013 sales revenue. Tianchen also applied 45 invention patents in 2013, 15% higher than previous year, helping it become one of the Top 200 of the International Engineering Design Firms.
Actually, China’s R&D investment increases year by year, and China’s number of invention patent applications has taken the first place of the world in continuous three years. Data shows that, China’s export proportion of mechanical and electronic products and high-tech products exceeded 57.3% and 29.9% in 2013, but most of the core technologies are belong to foreign companies; 61.2% of the export mechanical and electronic products were manufactured by foreign companies and 51.1% of them were by processing trade; 73% of the high-tech products were manufactured by foreign companies and 65.3% of them were by processing trade. For many years, China has been relied on large quantity and low price to take part in international competitions, thus it is hard for China to make high profits. Intellectual property is the key to solve the problem.
According to some experts, to improve the quantity and quality of patent applications is the priority for China to catch up with developed countries. Therefore, to continue to increase R&D investment is an important strategic task for China.
(Source: China IP Protection)
