76% of Patents Filed In India in Last 13 Years Were By Foreign Companies

admin September 11, 2020 Daily Current Affairs

Nearly eight out of every ten patent applications filed in India in more than a decade have been by foreigners residing abroad.
A majority are by foreign firms, even as the number of Indian applications is slowly increasing.
More than 5.1 lakh patent applications were filed in the country between 2005-06 and 2017-18
- according to the data compiled by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) as part of the latest Science & Technology Indicators (STI 2019-20) released recently.
Among the patents filed by foreigners, most are individuals or companies from the
- US, Japan and Germany,
- accounting for more than 45% of the patents in the said period,
- While the UK, France, Switzerland, Russia, Netherlands and Italy also had hundreds of applications filed.
With nearly 1.4 lakh applications, patents filed by those from the US alone accounted for more than 27% of total applications filed in the said period.
The STI-2019-20 also provides data on top foreign companies filing patents in the five years between 2013-14 and 2017-18.
Analysis shows that most of the top 19 companies were tech and telecom firms, including Chinese MNC Huawei Technologies.
Qualcomm Incorporated—an American semiconductor and telecommunications equipment firm — tops the table with 6,960 applications, followed by Dutch multinational firm Koninklijke Philips, which had 3,670 applications.