Cross comparison of US, EU, JP and Korean companies patenting activity in Japan and in the Peoples Republic of China

The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the patent filing statistics of selected US, European, Japanese and Korean companies in Japan and China with their granted patent statistics in the USA to discern patenting in China trends. The companies are IBM, Canon, Hitachi, Fujitsu, SONY, NEC, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Matsushita, Samsung, LG Electronics, Siemens, Philips, Intel, Motorola, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, Lucent Technologies, Procter & Gamble, 3M and Kodak, and comparison charts are provided for each. The results suggest that a number of major Korean and European companies are now filing as many applications in China, and for LG Electronics twice as many, as the numbers of US granted patents they are obtaining. For most of the selected Japanese companies Chinese filings are now about half that of their US grants. For the selected US companies, the comparison is rather different because US grants result from home filings, but indicate that these companies are only filing Chinese applications, and also often Japanese applications too, at a rate that is a small fraction of their US grants. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.