According to the 2015 World Intellectual Property Report published by WIPO on December 14, 2015, there had been about 2.7 million patents filed around the world, up 4.5% from 2013 with the 5th consecutive growth recorded. China was on the top of the filing amount, followed by US and Japan, and surpassed these two countries’ total. As of 2014, there are totally around 10.2 million registered patents around the world, most of them are from US at 24.7% of the total, followed by Japan and then China at 11.7%.

IT and computer technology is the strongest sector among patent filing with a share of 7.8%, next comes electrical machinery, measurement and digital communication; meanwhile digital communication and IT are the fastest growing sectors in this area over the past 20 years.