Saudi Arabia leads the Arab world in having the biggest number of patents at 147 patents to its credit, figures from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) showed. The United Arab Emirates followed with 39 patents filed last year from 30 in 20120. The UAE is followed by Morocco (17) and Kuwait ranks third among the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries with four patents. Saudi Arabia had the most patent filings with 78 followed by the UAE with 29, Qatar with 7, Oman with 4 while Kuwait and Bahrain with nothing last year. Among the Gulf countries, Qatar had the biggest year-on-year growth of 600 percent followed by Oman with 100 percent while UAE had a marginal growth of 3.57 percent. The UAE and Saudi Arabia had the biggest year-on-year growth of 16.66 percent in 2009. "After the 2009 economic crisis, overall global Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) filings recovered slightly last year almost reaching the 2008 level," Francis Gurry, Director of WIPO, said. He said the fast growth rates from East Asia reflect acceleration in the geographic diversification of innovative activities. This trend has many implications, not least an increased linguistic diversity of the technology that patent offices use as a basis for determining whether an invention is patentable. The filing of a patent application is the first step before the technology is used for commercial purposes. The total number of patents recorded in the world in 2011 was 181,900, an increase of 10.7 percent, compared to 2010. Statistics from a GCC office on intellectual property rights (IPR) indicate there are 21,121 applications for patent, of which 922 are of this year. Of these 1,291 have already been granted approval. "The recovery in international patent filings that we saw in 2010 gained strength in 2011," Gurry further said. "This underlines the important role played by the PCT system in a world where innovation is an increasingly important feature of economic strategy. It also shows that companies have been continuing to innovate in 2011 - reassuring news in times of persistent economic uncertainty." Attesting to the rapid growth of the PCT system, 2011 also saw the filing of the two millionth PCT application, by US-based mobile technology company Qualcomm. Among the top filing countries, PCT applications from China (+33.4 percent), Japan (+21 percent), Canada (+8.3 percent), the Republic of Korea (+8 percent) and the US (+8 percent) saw the fastest growth in 2011. European countries witnessed a mixed performance, with Switzerland (+7.3 percent), France (+5.8 percent), Germany (+5.7 percent) and Sweden (+4.6 percent) experiencing growth, and the Netherlands (-14 percent), Finland (-2.7 percent), Spain (-2.7 percent) and the United Kingdom (-1 percent) seeing declines. The large middle-income economies of the Russian Federation (+20.8 percent), Brazil (+17.2 percent) and India (+11.2 percent) recorded double-digit filing growth. The US with 48,596 filings remains the largest user of the PCT system, followed by Japan (38,888), Germany (18,568) and China (16,406). However, the US (-0.7 percent) and Germany (-0.5 percent) saw drop in their shares of total filings, while China (+1.5) and Japan (+1.8) each increased their share by more than a percentage point.
