'Positive' partnership helps China modernize

The "positive, win-win" partnership between the EPO and its peer in China, the State Intellectual Property Office, has created an IP environment in the country that is familiar to European companies. 

SIPO received nearly 1 million invention patent applications in 2014, including some 127,000 from abroad. The European Union was the second-largest overseas filer with the office, with 28 percent of foreign filings from EU member states. 

In the same year, Chinese filers contributed more than 9 percent of some 270,000 applications filed with EPO, mainly clustering around the sectors of digital communication, computer technology and telecommunications. 

The three sectors represented more than half of all patent applications from China in Europe last year. Telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies ranked fifth among the top 10 filers with EPO, the first time that a Chinese company has joined the top 10 at the European office. 

Annual filings from China increased tenfold at EPO over the past decade and is surging. 

Since SIPO and EPO established cooperation relations in 1985, thousands of IP specialists and professionals from Europe and China have joined in seminars, roundtable discussions, training and reciprocal visits. 

The rise in people-to-people exchanges have also helped create a better IP ecosystem, the EPO president said.