Our country strengthens the basic services of intellectual property in the equipment industry, with a record high in patent applications.

The second patent situation report meeting in the field of equipment manufacturing, jointly organized by the Equipment Industry Department and the Science and Technology Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, was held recently in Changsha, Hunan Province. The meeting released the "Patent Situation Report in the Field of Equipment Manufacturing (2013)", analyzing the patent layout characteristics in key technology areas such as automobiles, ships, bearings, and instruments, and proposed that in the next stage, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will continue to strengthen the basic service capacity of industry intellectual property rights with the implementation of two projects as the main line.

Patent applications reach a new high

The report shows that in 2012, patent applications in China's equipment manufacturing industry reached a new high, accounting for 28.1% of the national patent application volume, with the proportion of invention patents in the country being 34.8%, a year-on-year increase of 5.5%.

Li Wei, deputy director of the Equipment Industry Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, stated that currently, China's equipment manufacturing industry has entered a reasonable growth range of medium to low speed. It is difficult to see double-digit growth again. "Nevertheless, intellectual property rights are still very active. Especially in 2012, the year-on-year growth of invention patent applications exceeded 50%." The characteristics of patent applications in the equipment manufacturing field are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

The application volume of instruments and meters, electrical engineering, and petrochemical general industries accounts for more than half.

Industries such as instruments and meters, printing machinery, agricultural machinery, and machine tools have the highest patent density, although lower than abroad, they have a significant advantage domestically.

The number of foreign invention patent applications in China has reached 60,000, with the proportion of China's total invention patents dropping from 58% in 2007 to 26.2% in 2012, indicating that the number of patent applications in China is increasing year by year.

The layout of foreign patent applications in China is concentrated in the fields of instruments and meters, electrical engineering, automobiles, medical machinery, and petrochemical general equipment. These five industries account for 75%. In the three industries of printing machinery, medical machinery, and automobiles, foreign invention patents exceed 40% of China's total invention patents.

"It can be seen that there is still a significant gap in the creation, application, and quantity of intellectual property rights among China's equipment manufacturing enterprises," Li Wei pointed out. On the one hand, the pressure mechanism of the equipment manufacturing industry forces us to cultivate endogenous motivation and rely on innovation-driven development. On the other hand, in the next two years until the end of the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", the transformation and upgrading of the equipment manufacturing industry still need to strengthen top-level design.

Deeply promote the construction of two projects

According to statistics, as of the end of June 2013, the total number of patent applications in China's industrial sector has reached 5.14 million, a year-on-year increase of 29%. "It can be said that in terms of the number of patent applications, we have accumulated a certain advantage. However, the issues of insufficient control over core independent patents and weak awareness of intellectual property rights are still prominent," said Han Jun, deputy director of the Science and Technology Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In the next stage, the Ministry will continue to focus on the implementation of two projects to enhance the intellectual property application capabilities of enterprises and strengthen the industry's risk prevention and control capabilities.

In terms of the early warning project, we will continue to select key technology areas to deploy research topics and encourage enterprises to participate in the early warning project. We will strengthen the control over the quality of research topics and the training of patent analysis methods. Currently, the early warning project is implemented by the department, and we hope that provinces and cities can also participate in the next step. We will explore the establishment of an early warning response mechanism, initially considering selecting a few provinces and cities with high patent density and high infringement risk for pilot projects, to explore feasible operating mechanisms, accumulate experience, and improve and promote them. We will improve the early warning information release platform and strengthen the sharing and promotion of early warning results.

In terms of the cultivation project, we will further take effective measures to promote the in-depth implementation of the cultivation project. We will study and formulate a cultivation project evaluation index system in conjunction with the measures, methods, and effects of cultivation work in various regions with provinces and cities. At the end of 2014, we will evaluate the cultivation project work in provinces and cities and commend those that perform well. We will continue to promote and implement the "Guidelines for Intellectual Property Management in Industrial Enterprises", and carry out advanced typical demonstration promotion. In 2015, we will organize the selection of benchmark enterprises for intellectual property application in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology system to better play the exemplary role of demonstration and benchmark enterprises.

It is reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will successively organize relevant patent situation releases in the fields of electronic information, raw materials, consumer goods, and more.