Huawei, a major Chinese telecommunications company, for the first time ranks No. 1 in the world among all the company and individual applicants for the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), according to the latest statistics released from the World Intellectual Property Organization. Huawei had the highest number of patent filings, with a total of 1737 applications in 2008.

Ranking second through fifth were Panasonic (Japan), Philips Electronics NV (Netherlands), Toyota (Japan) and Robert Bosch GMBH (Germany).

Statistics show in 2008 international PCT filings totaled 164,000, an increase of 2.4 percent year-on-year. The US ranked first in the world with over 53,000 fillings and Japan and Germany came in second and third with over 28,000 and over 18,000 filings respectively. The other countries in the top 10 were South Korea, France, China, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland in sequence.

The number of filings from South Korea, China and Sweden recorded the largest increases. Last year, South Korea filed 7,908 patents, China 6,089 patents and Sweden 4,114 patents, representing growth rates as high as 12 percent, 11.9 percent and 12.5 percent respectively.

(People's Daily February 4, 2009)