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UPC » The UPC in numbers: one year on

Since the UPC opened its doors and the first Unitary Patents were filed in the summer of 2023, the unitary route for European patents has been sought over 30,000 times, with 29,939 Unitary Patents being registered – an uptake rate of 19.6%.

In this article we’ll consider the early life of the UPC and the unitary patent so far in numbers.

Application figures by industry
The figures on Unitary Patents (UP) filed so far demonstrates a broad interest in seeking unitary registration. Medical Technology is the largest single source of UPs by a considerable margin (with some 12% of the total, and over 3,000 filed to date). However, beyond this the statistics become more congested, with Transport, Digital Communications, Civil engineering and Other Special Machines all seeing around 5% of the total filed. When taken as a whole, the chemistry fields of Organic fine chemistry,

Also worth noting is the relatively low uptake for consumer goods (993 applications, 3%), biotechnology (709, 2.3%), and environmental tech (429 applications, 1.4%).

Languages
The procedural language for UP registration has been predominately English at 73.7%. German and French remain a much smaller use case at 20% and 6%, respectively.

At the moment registering a UP requires filing a full translation of the granted specification. Spanish (at 30%) has been the most common choice for translation, likely owing to Spain’s position (currently) outside of the UPCA. Translations into German (21.4%) and English (26.2%) are the next common uses.

Proprietors profile
In its first year the UPC and UPs has been mostly utilised by established large enterprises, with companies identifying as such making up 56% of the registered UPs since June 2023. This might in part be driven a need to protect large-scale portfolios which is a more common concern for pan-European large-scale businesses.

That isn’t to say that the unitary route hasn’t been used by smaller companies (35.5%) and universities and research institutions (7.6%) which might see more use of the UPC in the future.

Origins of proprietors
As might be expected, the majority of applicants for the unitary route are from within Europe. The largest proportion of these originate in Germany (at 19%) with the next closest being France at 6.9%. The UK represents 4.2% or proprietors.

There has been a healthy spread of applicants from outside of the European bloc as well, particularly from the USA (16.1%) – the second most represented country, after Germany; Japan (3.8%), China (5.9%) and Korea (3.3%).

Conclusions
The statistics on the UPC demonstrate the breadth of take up of the unitary patent route across industries and patent fields. They also indicate that the proprietors of unitary patents are international, with a particular interest from Germany, US, China and Korea.

Primarily, over half of those seeking unitary patents have been large-scale business so far, perhaps indicating the lure of the unitary route for larger, more established patent portfolios rather than single inventors or smaller innovators.

The unitary patent model is still in its infancy. We at Boult look forward to seeing how the profile for unitary patent applicants, their background and the industries in which they are seeking protection continues to develop in the near future.

For more on the UPC and unitary patents, read the latest commentary from our team here.

Relevant sectors
Food and beverage
  • Nutrition
  • Retail
  • Beverages
Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Consumer goods and retail
  • Anti-counterfeit devices
  • Moda
  • Health, fitness and sport
  • Beauty
  • Fashion
  • Luxury goods
  • Retail
  • Household goods
Trade marks
  • Mechanical products
  • Services
  • Telecommunications
  • Financial services
  • Cosmetics and perfumery
  • Consumer goods
Chemicals
  • Agrochemicals
  • Catalysts
  • Dispersions and colloids
  • Lubricants
  • Polymers and plastics
Materials
  • Advanced materials
  • Composite materials
  • Metallurgy and alloys
  • Nanotechnology
Industrial manufacturing and processing
  • Packaging
  • Polymers and plastics
  • Printing tech
  • Additive manufacturing
  • Coatings
  • Construction
Electronics and electrical devices
  • Restaurants and bars
  • Travel and leisure
  • Testing systems, control systems, signal processing
  • Computer and IT architecture and system design
  • Medical devices
  • Optics
  • Robotics
  • Scientific instruments
  • Semiconductor devices
  • Wearable tech and human interfaces
Communications and networks
  • Oceanography, marine
  • Cloud computing
  • Internet of things (IOT)
  • Wired and wireless networks
Energy and green technologies
  • Solar power
  • Wind turbines
  • Water, oil and gas, nuclear, fusion, fission
  • Clean air
  • Fuel cells and battery technology
  • Renewables and recycling
  • Biofuels
Automotive
  • Autonomous vehicles
  • Electric vehicles
  • Engines
Aerospace
  • Commercial aviation
  • Defence and security
  • Space and satellites
  • Unmanned aerial vehicles
Pharmaceuticals
  • Pharmaceuticalsceutical formulations
  • Diagnostics
  • Drug delivery
  • Generic market entry
  • Medicinal chemistry
  • Methods of production and synthesis
  • Personalised medicine/disease biomarkers
  • Pharmaceutical formulations
  • Polymorphs
  • Small molecule pharmaceuticals
  • Supplementary protection certificates (SPCs)
Biotechnology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Next generation sequencing
  • Women’s health products
  • Vaccinology (e.g. viral vectors; mRNA vaccines)
  • Therapeutic antibodies
  • Synthetic biology
  • Stem cell therapies
  • Recombinant protein production and purification
  • Personalised medicine/disease biomarkers
  • Nucleic acid synthesis
  • Supplementary protection certificates (SPCs)
  • Immuno-oncology (e.g. checkpoint inhibitors; modified T cells)
  • GM crops
  • Genomic and molecular tools and methods
  • Gene editing (e.g. CRISPR)
  • Drug delivery
  • Biosimilars
  • Antibody manufacture and formulation
  • Antibody engineering
Medical devices and diagnostics 
  • Immuno-oncology
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Devices
  • Diagnostic instruments
  • Digital health
  • Drug delivery
  • In vitro diagnostics
  • Medtech
Computing and software
  • Digital assistants, virtual assistants and software agents
  • Multimedia, audio/video processing and animation
  • Metaverse, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)
  • Data management and storage, databases and data compression
  • Data and software security, cryptography and digital rights management (DRM)
  • Software applications and systems, mobile applications, user interfaces
  • Natural language processing
  • Search engines
  • Robotic process automation
  • Quantum computing
  • Motor capture
  • Machine vision
  • Fintech and adtech
  • Computer games
  • Communications and networks
  • Blockchain and distributed ledgers
  • Bioinformatics
  • Signal processing
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning