On October 16, 2024, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) released the “China’s Patent-Intensive Industries Statistical Monitoring Report” (中国专利密集型产业统计监测报告). Per CNIPA, “Conducting statistical monitoring of patent-intensive industries is an important measure to implement the decisions and arrangements of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council on cultivating and developing patent-intensive industries. The National Intellectual Property Administration has issued annual monitoring reports for many consecutive years, providing data support for the formulation of relevant policies, effectively promoting the deep integration and development of intellectual property rights and industries, and playing a positive role in promoting high-quality economic and social development.”

Some highlights from the Report:

• China’s patent-intensive industries gathered nearly 50% of the R&D investment of enterprises across the country, producing about 70% of invention patents, and contributing 12.71% of the country’s GDP.
• In 2022, the added value of China’s patent-intensive industries reached 15.32 trillion RMB after reaching 12 trillion yuan in 2020. The average annual growth rate from 2018 to 2022 was 9.36%, 2.37 percentage points higher than the average annual growth rate of GDP at current prices in the same period. In 2022, the added value of China’s patent-intensive industries accounted for 12.71% of GDP, an increase of 0.27 percentage points over the previous year and a cumulative increase of 1.07 percentage points over 2018.
• Among patent-intensive industries, the information and communication technology service industry and the information and communication technology manufacturing industry, as representatives of emerging industries, achieved an average annual growth rate of 14.86% and 10.23%, respectively, in added value.
• In 2022, the internal expenditure of R&D funds in China’s patent-intensive industries reached 1.14 trillion RMB, an increase of 11.28% over the previous year, and the investment intensity reached 2.46%, an increase of 0.11 percentage points over the previous year, an increase of 0.40 percentage points over 2018, and 2.23 times that of non-patent-intensive industries. 
• In 2022, the number of employees in China’s patent-intensive industries totaled 49.1665 million , an increase of 460,100 over the previous year, accounting for 6.70% of the total number of employees in the society, an increase of 0.18 percentage points over the previous year, and an increase of 0.52 percentage points over 2018.
• In 2022, the labor productivity of China’s patent-intensive industries reached 313,000 RMB per person, an increase of 4.50% over the previous year, which is 2.06 times the labor productivity of non-patent-intensive industries.

The full report is available here (Chinese only).