Switzerland tops for European patent filings

The mountain country made 848 patent filings per million population in 2014, the EPO said in a report issued on Thursday.


That put the Swiss ahead of Finland (416), Netherlands (406) Sweden (395), Denmark (354) and Germany (316).

With total patent filings of 7,900, Switzerland ranked eighth globally and fourth in Europe, behind Germany, France and the Netherlands, the EPO said.

Zurich-based engineering firm ABB headed the list of Swiss companies for new patents (450), ahead of Nestlé (442), the Swiss branch of Alstom (408), and pharmaceutical giants Roche (357) and Novartis (323).

Globally, the number of patent filings with the European office grew for the fifth year in a row to reach a record 274,174 in 2014, up three percent from the previous year.

EPO President Benoit Battistelli said that 41 countries now recognize European patents as national patents.

The top technical fields for patent applications were medical technology (11,124, up 3.2 percent), electrical machinery (10,944, up eight percent) and digital communication (10,018, up 6.6 percent.

For more information about European patent filings, check here.