Munich, 19/07/2001 (Agence Europe) - In 2000, 142,940 requests for patents were submitted to the European Patents' Office (EPO), or up 16% on requests the previous year.
49.4% (50.4% in 1999) of requests for patents submitted came from member States of the EPO, today numbering twenty since Turkey signed up to the European Patents Convention, 28% (1999: 28.63%) from the United States and 17% from Japan (1999: 16.4%). Among European States, it was Germany, with 20% of the requests, that was the most active, followed by France (6.7%). In addition, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland and Italy recorded a substantial increase on 1999. Generally-speaking, the greatest number of requests submitted in 2000 concerned electronic communications (9.3%), medical techniques (8.8%), electric components (7%) and data treatment (5%). The steepest growth was recorded in the field of data treatment (+28%), bio-chemicals-genetics (+23.4%) and electronic communications techniques (+18.6%).