SafeguardingIPR
Chen Hongbing, Director of the WIPO Office in China
The battles among tech giants are legendary.
But where in the past Apple and Samsung used to trade blows over patents, there’s a new major player in the ring. In a shift of roles, China’s Huawei Technologies has now joined in.
Huawei filed a lawsuit against Samsung’s subsidiaries in China, claiming that more than 20 models of Samsung smartphones and tablet products, including the flagship Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 Edge, have infringed its patents.
This April, the Quanzhou Intermediate People’s Court in southeast China’s Fujian Province ruled Samsung Electronics pay 80 million yuan ($11.6 million) to Huawei for patent infringements.
The court ruling marks the giant Chinese smartphone maker’s first victory in safeguarding its intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the local market.
Huawei is one of the top Chinese brands with a large number of patents. According to statistics, by the end of 2016, the company had owned more than 55,000 patents worldwide, 90 percent of which are invention patents.
Huawei’s victory over Samsung highlights the importance of innovation and patents. It’s just one of the many successful cases of Chinese companies protecting their IPRs. Insiders believe that IPRs now play an important role in protecting creativity and driving innovation.
Focusing on innovation
In the past, many Chinese companies had little awareness of IPR protection and suffered great losses for infringing IPRs of foreign enterprises. But Chinese companies are now looking to innovate for a consumer base that is increasingly demanding, says Shaun Rein in his book The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation and Individualism in Asia.
“Chinese companies are no longer copycats, but are instead innovating and adding value,” said Rein, who is the founder and managing director of the China Market Research Group, the world’s leading strategic market intelligence firm headquartered in Shanghai, China.
This rise in innovation saw China record extraordinary growth of international patent applications in 2016, increasing 44.7 percent year on year, according to a report released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on March 15, 2017.
A total of 43,168 applications were filed in China through Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in 2016, putting the country in third place after the United States and Japan, the WIPO said. Since 2002, China has registered double-digit growth each year and will become the largest user of the PCT system within two years if this trend continues.
China’s telecoms giants ZTE Corp., filing 4,123 PCT applications, and Huawei, with 3,692, occupied the top two spots in the list of PCT applicants, according to the report.
“The number of PCT applications is an important indicator to reflect industrial innovation capability and also a major index to evaluate international competitiveness of enterprises,” said Li Shunde, Dean of the Department of Law and Intellectual Property at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“The numbers speak of the importance China attaches to IPR protection and the innovation capacities of Chinese companies,” Li added.
Li’s view was echoed by Chen Hongbing, Director of the WIPO Office in China. He said the country has joined the ranks of the world’s 25 most innovative economies, according to the Global Innovation Index 2016, jointly released by the U.S. Cornell University, European Institute of Business Administration and the WIPO last year.
Statistics from the Ministry of Science and Technology show that China’s investment in research and development reached nearly 2.1 percent of the GDP in 2016, totaling 1.544 trillion yuan ($224 billion). The figure puts the country in second place worldwide, next only to the United States.
“On an international level, the China-based filers are behind much of the growth in international patent and trademark filings,” said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry. He believes this will have a big impact on businesses internationalizing as the country continues its journey from “made in China” to “created in China.”
The optical masers produced by Shandong Huaguang Optoelectronics Co. Ltd. with its own IPR