Comparative Benchmarking: India vs ASEAN, China, South Korea, European Union
India’s patent filings grew faster than those of every comparator in the set (88.7%, against 22.1% for China, 9.8% for the EPO and 8.6% for South Korea), but its examiner corps of 593 to 626 is a fraction of the EPO’s roughly 3,982 and Korea’s 978, and its examiners are the least experienced on record among comparators.
The dataset puts India next to seven comparators on filing growth, resident share, examiner capacity, pendency, trademarks and designs. India’s 2024 resident share (60.1% on WIPO’s
calendar-year count, close to but not identical to CGPDTM’s own 61.79% fiscal-year figure)
lies in the middle of the pack, comfortably below China’s 91.5% and Korea’s 77.3%, but far above Singapore (14.1%), Vietnam (12.4%), Thailand (10.7%) and Indonesia (21.0%)
India’s average examiner experience was 5.9 years in 2022, against 11.3 in Korea and 13.7 in the USA. WIPO measured India’s first-action pendency at 10.6 months in 2023, which is competitive, but total pendency to final decision stayed at 49.5 to 51.0 months since 2021, which is where India lags. India ranked 4th globally in trademark class counts (555,613 in 2024), rose from 11th to 7th in designs, and ranks 38th on the Global Innovation Index.
Published by: ASIA, State of Intellectual Property in India, Chapter 4.
What’s inside: Patent applications, domestic filing share, trademark and design filings, trademark classes by office, examiner workforce, first-action pendency and the examination pipeline.
Why it matters: The comparison shows India’s gap is institutional (examiner depth, audited quality metrics, consistent pendency reporting) and not about filing volume.
Years covered: Generally 2020 to 2024, the five most recent reported years for each metric (India on a financial-year basis).
Places covered: India against China, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the European Patent Office.
Data sources: IP5 Statistics Report series, six editions of WIPO WIPI, CGPDTM Annual Reports, national office reports including IPOS Singapore.
Things to keep in mind: WIPO’s first-action pendency and the CGPDTM’s own sub-12-month figure use different starting points and are not directly comparable. Some Indonesian figures are practitioner-verified estimates, not official office statistics.
