On February 10, 2023, the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) released the statistics of patent and trademark filings it received in 2022.
Patent
According to TIPO’s data, a total of 72,059 patent applications were received by the TIPO in 2022, slightly decreasing by 0.8% compared to 2021.
Of the three types of patent filings, invention applications grew by 2% and reached to 50,242, marking a record high in the past decade, but both utility models and design filings shrank by 7%.
Broken down by applicant’s nationalities, the number of invention filings by domestic applicants is 19,400, while foreign applicants filed 30,842 inventions in 2022, a remarkable increase of 4% compared with 2021.
When combining the numbers of all three types of patent filings, the momentum of foreign applicants remained strong in 2022, contributing to a total of 35,579 filings in all three types of patents, translating to an annual growth of 2%. In contrast, filings from local applicants did not stop the downward trend since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, coming to 36,480 (compared to 39,604 in 2019); the number of utility model applications even fell below the 14,000 mark.
Among non-Taiwanese patent applicants, Japanese applicants continued to rank first (13,128 filings), followed by US applicants (8,517 filings). PRC applicants ranked third, reaching a new high at 4,424 filings. Korean applicants ranked the fourth, contributed 2,775 filings, and German applicants ranked the fifth (1,242 filings). In terms of patents types, invention and design filings of non-Taiwanese applicants were mostly contributed by Japanese applicants, while PRC applicants took the biggest share in utility model filings among non-Taiwanese applicants.
Despite the challenges of the epidemic, TIPO's patent examination cycle has been maintained at a promising pace. In 2022, it only took the TIPO 8.8 months on average to issue a first substantive examination opinion, and 14.3 months on average to complete the entire substantive examination proceeding, both counting from the date on which the substantive examination starts.
Trademark
Thanks to domestic applicants’ sustained momentum, trademark applications remained strong in 2022, reaching 94,778 (counted by applications rather than classes). Among them, 74,326 applications were filed by domestic applicants, an increase of 1% compared with 2021. In contrast, foreign applicants only contributed 20,452 filings in 2022.
Discounting filings from Taiwanese applicants, trademark filings in 2022 were mainly contributed by applicants from the following five jurisdictions: PRC (4,324 filings, a drop of 12%), the US (3,572, a drop of 11%), Japan (3,546, an increase of 3%), Korea (1,573, an increase of 0.1%), and Hong Kong (1,120, a decrease of 28%).