On February 7, 2020, the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) published online a quantitative overview of patent and trademark filings it received in 2019.
Patent
According to TIPO’s data, a total of 74,652 patent applications were received by the TIPO in 2019, making an increase of 2% compared with the previous year.
Of the three types of patent filings, invention applications grew by 2% (compared with the data of 2018, same below), showing a steady increase since 2017.
Broken down by applicant’s nationalities, the number of invention filings by domestic applicants is 18,984 (the highest record since 2015), while foreign applicants filed 29,284 inventions in 2019 (an annual increase of 1%).
When combining the numbers of all three types of patent filings, the momentum of foreign applicants remained strong in 2019, contributing to a total of 35,048 filings which translated to an annual growth of 3%. Filings from domestic applicants bounced back pleasantly in 2019, totaling 39,604, an increase of 1% compared with the filings in 2018. The most heartening signal comes from the design side, especially the design applications by foreign applicants which contributed 4,596 filings at an annual growth of 20%.
Among non-Taiwanese patent applicants, Japanese applicants continued to rank first in 2019 (14,598 filings), followed by applicants from the US (7,437 filings). Applicants from the PRC ranked third, approaching a new high of 3,698 filings. Korean applicants ranked fourth, contributed 1,814 filings. In terms of patents types, invention and design filings of non-Taiwanese applicants were mostly filed by Japanese applicants, while PRC applicants took the biggest share in utility model filings among non-Taiwanese applicants.
The TIPO’s initiatives to speed up patent examination prove to be fruitful. In 2019, it only took the TIPO 8.4 months on average to issue a first substantive examination opinion, and 13.6 months on average to complete the entire substantive examination proceeding, both counting from the date on which the substantive examination starts.
Trademark
In 2019, thanks to foreign applicants’ sustained momentum, trademark filings (for registrations, same below) reached a new high in a continued growth for 19 years, with a total of 86,794 filings (counted by applications rather than classes) being received by the TIPO. Among them, 61,928 applications were filed by domestic applicants (an increase of 3% compared with 2018), while 24,866 applications were filed by foreign entities (roughly on the same scale as in 2018).
Without counting filings from Taiwanese applicants, trademark filings in 2019 were mainly contributed by applicants from the following five jurisdiction (with four of them from Asian markets): PRC (6,108 filings, an increase of 6%), Japan (4,748, an increase of 0.4%), the US (3,621, a decrease of 14% to reach the level of 2017), Korea (1,668, an increase of 16%), and Hong Kong (1,617, a decrease of 2%).
