International application: the SIPO accepted 133,613 international invention applications in total, including 40,078 Japanese applications, 37,216 US applications, 13,851 German applications, 12,907 Korean applications, and 12,907 French applications. Besides, 78,750 invention applications entered China through PCT in 2015.

Allowance: the SIPO has allowed 1,718,192 patents, including 359,316 inventions (up by 54.1% from the same time last year), 876,217 utility models, and 482,659 designs.

Examination period: 809,661 invention patent applications entered substantive examination in 2015, up by 18.7% from the same time last year; 661,265 OA1 were issued, up by 23.7% from the same time last year; 557,625 cases were concluded, up by 29.5% from the same time last year; the average examination period (from the effective date of substantive examination to the date of conclusion of examination) of invention patent application was 21.9 months. 1,006,385 utility modes were concluded with an examination period of 2.9 months (from the date of filing to the date of conclusion of examination). 620,775 designs were concluded with an average examination period of 3 months (from the date of filing to the date of conclusion of examination).

Reexamination and invalidation: 12,678 reexamination requests were accepted, with invention, utility model, and design accounting for 94.0%, 5.0% and 1.0% respectively; 25,756 reexamination cases were concluded with an average period of 12.3 months (from the filing date to the concluding date). 3,724 invalidation requests were accepted, with invention, utility model, and design accounting for 20.0%, 47.5% and 32.5% respectively; 3,652 invalidation cases were concluded with a period of 5.4 months (from the filing date to the concluding date).

In 2015, 56,735 invention applications were rejected; 11,920 invention applications requested for reexamination, showing a reexamination rate of 21%.

(Source: A Brief Introduction and Review of SIPO of the P.R. China)