By Greg Gao

China National Intellectual Property Administration(CNIPA) released the Report on the Number of Invention Patents by Private Enterprises in China (2021) on December 5. Chinese tech titan Huawei tops the invention patent grants list with 7,630 patents, followed by internet giant Tencent with 4,537 patents, smartphone brand OPPO ranking third with 4,196 patents, JW Insights reported.

Smartphone vendor Vivo, home appliance manufacturer Gree, tech giant Xiaomi, PC maker Lenovo, EV behemoth BYD, and search engine giant Baidu also entered the top ten list.

As the world’s leading provider of ICT (information and communication) infrastructure and intelligent devices, Huawei was granted 7,630 invention patents in China in 2021, an increase of 19.78% over the previous year, and the average annual growth rate in the past three years is 30.51%. Currently, Huawei holds the world’s largest number of 5G patents.

According to data released by the Intellectual Property Development Research Center of CNIPA, Huawei has 6,583 5G standard patent families worldwide, accounting for 14% of the total, ranking first globally.

OPPO has seen an increase of 17.31% in its invention patents in 2021, with an average annual growth rate of 27.07% in the past three years, the report showed.

According to the data from CNIPA, as of the end of 2021, a total of 696,000 invention patents were granted throughout the year, of which the number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 population reached 7.5, an increase of 1.2 over the previous year. Chinese applicants filed 69,500 international patent applications through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), ranking first in the world for the third consecutive year, said CNIPA report.