Patent applications in the course of a year

How the summer vacations affect enrollment figures in various EU countries

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Whether and how the Corona pandemic affects the number of patent applications cannot be determined at this time, as patent offices do not publish applications for at least 18 months. What we looked at in more detail in this paper: How do the summer vacations affect the patent landscape in different European countries?

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The chart above shows the monthly number of national patent applications in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Finland. The monthly average value for a five-year period from 2014 to 2018 is used. And lo and behold: especially in France, a very clear decrease in patent applications can be observed in August. This trend is also clearly discernible in Spain, which can be seen in particular in the second graph: here, the relative activity of patent offices per month is plotted compared to the annual average. In Finland, this effect is also present, but rather distributed also over the summer months of July and August. In the UK and Germany, this behavior is apparently hardly present and patents are therefore also filed quite continuously in the summer. In some countries, there is also a pronounced effect at the turn of the year with a "year-end rally" (a relative increase in December), then a pronounced decrease in January and then an increase again in the spring.

Such representations can also be made for other countries as well as for specific industries, technologies and companies, thus providing insights into the filing behavior for certain markets.