Mais um da Economist

Innovation in Asia

China is about to overtake Japan in patent applications

Sep 30th 2010 | TOKYO

ONLY five years ago, most of the expensive bits and pieces inside a typical Apple iPod came from Japan. Today an autopsy of the iPad reveals that nearly all the important components come from South Korea and Taiwan. In such a short time Japan’s dominance of Asia’s technology industry has been eroded by its neighbours.

Between 2006 and 2009, the number of patent applications in America, Europe and South Korea largely held steady. But filings in Japan sank while those in China soared. If the pattern holds, more patents may be filed in China this year than in Japan for the first time, putting China in striking distance of America. It is an astonishing reversal. As recently as 2000, Japanese patent filings were four times greater than China’s. (…)

The economic crisis caused many firms to cut R&D spending. In 2008-09 many Japanese companies, including Sony, Sharp, Toyota and Toshiba, slashed their research budgets by 10-20%. However, Chinese firms such as Huawei and ZTE, which both make telecoms equipment, increased their R&D spending by 30-50%. China’s domestic research-spending is now poised to surpass Japan’s in purchasing-power terms.

An example of Japan’s R&D lethargy is Hitachi, its third-largest company with some $100 billion in sales. Hitachi habitually invests 4% of sales in R&D, explains its boss, Hiroaki Nakanishi. Yet this budgetary straitjacket is oblivious to market demands and it risks missing opportunities. Nevertheless, Mr Nakanishi says that he is satisfied with the approach. By comparison, Samsung, South Korea’s biggest conglomerate, plans to spend almost twice as much on research in absolute terms this year. Last year Samsung’s profits exceeded those of all nine of Japan’s big electronics firms combined.(…)

Japan still has the largest number of patents in force, at 1.9m in 2008, compared with 1.4m for America and a mere 134,000 for China. However, the countries where the greatest number of foreign patents are legally based are Barbados, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Ireland, notes the OECD. These patents mostly belong to Western firms seeking to reduce the tax they pay on licensing revenue. It is one innovation that OECD governments would like to make obsolete.”