On October 9, 2024, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) released the 2024 National Intellectual Property Service Industry Statistical Survey Report (2024年全国知识产权服务业统计调查报告). The report includes statistics such as the number of intellectual property agencies, average income for agencies, worker productivity, etc. for 2023. Some highlights from the report follow.

• By the end of 2023 there were about 89,000 institutions providing intellectual property services in China, a year-on-year increase of 2.9%. Among them, there are 5,269 patent agencies and 35,712 trademark agencies.
• In 2023, the total operating income of China’s intellectual property service industry was about 285 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 5.6%.
• The total operating income of patent agencies is about 46.26 billion RMB, and the average operating income per agency is 9.349 million RMB.
• In 2023, the average operating income (i.e., labor productivity) created by employees in the intellectual property service industry is 289,000 RMB per person.
• By the end of 2023, the number of employees in China’s intellectual property service industry was about 984,000, a year-on-year increase of 1.5%, of which 34,396 were practicing patent agents, a year-on-year increase of 9.7%  (see chart above).
• In 2023, 41.4% of intellectual property service agencies recruited new employees, and 15.8% of agencies hired fresh graduates. The age of new employees is mainly concentrated between 25 and 30 years old.
• 56.6% of intellectual property practitioners were female, about the same as the prior year’s survey.
• In 2023, the number of patent applications handled by patent agencies accounted for 90.6% of all domestic patent applications, a significant increase of 9.1 percentage points over the previous year. The agency rate for invention patent applications reached 94.4%, an increase of 4.7 percentage points over the previous year.

The full report is available here (Chinese only).