Volodymyr Khaustov, Academic Secretary of the State Institution “Institute for Economics and Forecasting of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine”
In the 21st century, technology, information and intellectual property have become some of the principal forms of capital in the global economy. The positions of states are increasingly determined not only by natural resources, industrial capacity or trade volumes, but also by their ability to create new technologies and, no less importantly, to transform scientific developments into products, industries and revenues.
This is precisely why patenting statistics today are much more than merely an indicator of inventive activity. They make it possible to see where the future technological potential of the global economy is concentrated.
And these statistics demonstrate a very clear trend: the center of global technological activity is shifting increasingly toward Asia.
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), approximately 3.7 million patent applications were filed worldwide in 2024, 4.9% more than a year earlier.
China was the undisputed leader, with 1.828 million applications, or almost half of the global total. By comparison, 603,200 applications were filed in the United States, 306,900 in Japan, 246,200 in South Korea and 105,200 in India. Detailed tables are available in the article on the website of the Experts Club information and analytical center.
The scale of the gap is telling: China filed three times as many patent applications as the United States and almost 31 times as many as Germany, the most active major EU economy in terms of patenting.
Europe’s presence among the global leaders generally appears increasingly modest. Germany is the only European Union country in the top ten by number of applications. France ranks 14th and Italy 18th. At the same time, more than half of the countries in the top 20 are Asian.
For Ukraine, these figures should be a serious warning.
In 2024, 2,559 patent applications were filed in Ukraine, corresponding to 35th place globally. Moreover, fewer than 3,000 applications per year has effectively become the norm for Ukraine in recent years.
The situation is illustrated even more clearly by the international Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system. It is particularly important because it indicates not merely a desire to register an invention domestically, but an intention to protect the technology in international markets and potentially transform it into a competitive product.
In 2024, 273,900 international PCT applications were filed worldwide.
China filed 70,160 such applications, the United States 54,087, Japan 48,397, South Korea 23,851 and Germany 16,721.
Ukraine filed only 112 applications, ranking 43rd.
At the same time, the fact that Ukraine had filed 90 applications a year earlier can be regarded as a positive signal. This means that the increase amounted to 22 applications, or approximately one quarter. However, the absolute numbers remain extremely small for a country with strong scientific traditions, a developed higher education system and significant human capital.
What is particularly striking is not China’s current position, but how quickly it was achieved.
In 1994, China filed only 106 international patent applications under the PCT procedure. The United States had almost 15,000 at the time.
Thirty years later, the situation had changed dramatically: China filed 70,160 applications and the United States 54,087.
Over three decades, China’s figure increased approximately 662-fold. In South Korea, it increased 124-fold and in Japan approximately 21-fold. By comparison, the increase in the United States was approximately 3.6-fold and in Germany 3.9-fold.
This cannot be explained solely by an increase in the number of scientists or research expenditure.
China has built a system in which science, industry, the state, universities and businesses work much more closely together, while intellectual property has become part of economic policy.
Another important indicator is who exactly patents inventions.
The role of business in international patenting is constantly growing worldwide. While companies accounted for 83.3% of PCT applications in 2010, their share had risen to 89.1% by 2024.
At the same time, the share of individual applicants fell from 8.9% to just 3.5%.
This is a fundamental point. Modern technologies are becoming increasingly complex and expensive. The development of new materials, pharmaceutical products, electronics, artificial intelligence systems or energy technologies requires laboratories, equipment, large teams and significant investment.
Technological development is therefore becoming less frequently the work of an individual inventor and increasingly the result of systematic work by businesses.
Businesses account for 96.5% of international patent applications in Japan, 98.6% in Sweden, 94.7% in Switzerland, 92.7% in Germany and 90.7% in China.
In Ukraine, the picture is the opposite.
Businesses accounted for only 27.7% of Ukrainian PCT applications in 2024, while 70.2% were filed by individual applicants.
By comparison, such a structure is unusual even among middle-income economies. Businesses account for 63.5% of applications in India, 61.5% in Türkiye and 78.2% in Malaysia.
In my opinion, this difference largely explains one of the main problems with Ukraine’s innovation model.
Ukraine has science, universities, researchers and inventors, but there is often no mechanism between scientific development and the economy that would transform an idea into a technology, a technology into a product, and a product into a competitive business.
There may be various reasons for this. For a long time, Ukrainian businesses have largely focused on trade, commodity sectors and rapid returns on investment. Investment in fundamental or applied research requires a much longer planning horizon and involves high risks.
At the same time, Ukraine’s system for evaluating scientific activity often encourages formal academic indicators rather than the economic outcome of research.
The number of articles in international scientometric databases is undoubtedly important for integrating Ukrainian science into the global academic community. But a publication alone does not create a new enterprise, production facility or export product.
Alongside scientific publications, patents, licensing agreements, technology transfers, the creation of start-ups and the introduction of developments into production must become important performance criteria.
This essentially means changing the underlying logic: from “science for the sake of a scientific result” to “science as one of the drivers of economic development.”
The global ranking of the largest corporate applicants shows who is shaping the technological future today.
In 2024, China’s Huawei ranked first in terms of international PCT applications, with 6,600 applications. It was followed by Samsung Electronics with 4,640, Qualcomm with 3,848, LG Electronics with 2,083 and China’s CATL with 1,993.
The top ten include four Chinese companies, two South Korean companies, two Japanese companies and only one company each from the United States and Sweden.
Among the 25 largest corporate applicants, eight companies represent Japan, seven China and four the United States.
Europe is represented much more weakly than it was several decades ago, when Siemens, Philips and Bosch were among the world’s leading technology corporations and Siemens headed international patent rankings for a long time.
This process has not only a technological but also a major geoeconomic dimension.
A country that controls technologies gains the ability to control a significant share of added value. A patent gives a company the right not merely to manufacture a product, but also to determine the terms of its use by other manufacturers, receive licensing payments and form entire technological ecosystems.
This is why intellectual property is increasingly becoming an instrument of global competition.
China’s experience demonstrates how rapidly a country’s position can change when the development of science, education, industry and intellectual property becomes part of a long-term economic strategy.
A large number of patents does not, of course, guarantee technological leadership by itself. Not every patent has commercial value, and not every invention becomes a successful product.
But tens of thousands of international applications every year mean the formation of an enormous technological portfolio, some of whose developments will almost inevitably become the foundation for new industries, products and global companies.
This is why intellectual property can be regarded as a kind of indicator of future economic development.
Looking at this indicator today, China has already created a substantial reserve of technological potential for the coming years.
For Ukraine, the conclusion should not be that it simply needs to increase the number of patents.
It is necessary to create a system in which it is economically beneficial for Ukrainian businesses to finance research, for universities and scientific institutions to cooperate with enterprises, and for scientists to be interested not only in publishing their results but also in implementing them in practice.
A separate task should be the restoration of industry-specific research, which historically served as one of the principal bridges between fundamental research and industry.
It is equally important to develop a professional technology-transfer infrastructure consisting of people and organizations capable of assessing the prospects of a development, properly securing intellectual property rights, finding an investor, arranging licensing and bringing the technology to the international market.
This issue will be particularly important for post-war Ukraine.
Rebuilding the country should not mean merely restoring destroyed infrastructure and production capacity in their previous form. It can become an opportunity to create a new economy—one that is more technology-intensive, more productive and much more deeply integrated into global value chains.
But for this to happen, science must cease to exist separately from the economy.
Ukraine’s place in global technological competition will ultimately be determined not by the number of scientific institutions, universities or publications as such. It will depend on how many Ukrainian ideas can complete the entire journey—from the laboratory and the patent to production, exports and a successful company.
It is this link that must be restored today.
