Only 26,000 large industrial companies in China applied for patents from 2004 to 2006, statistics show.

The National Bureau of Statistics released the statistics on Monday. This accounts for only 8.8 percent of the total number of large industrial companies in China. Urging domestic companies to pay more attention to their own intellectual property rights, the statistics showed that among nearly 300,000 large companies in China, only 73,000 have registered their trademarks.

Large industrial companies' production values accounted for more than 90 percent of the total in 2006.

According to the statistics, 20.7 percent of the large industrial companies have internal protection systems to keep technical secrets safe and 34.8 percent of them have own brands with full intellectual property rights.

One finding from the statistics has attracted researchers' attention: 20.8 percent of the companies invested in by Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan capital and 20.6 percent of the joint ventures with foreign investors applied for patents in 2006, lower than the ratio of the domestic companies of 27.5 percent.

According to a statistic released earlier by the State Intellectual Property Office, China had registered a total of 850,043 valid patents by the end of 2007, 16.9 percent up on the total of the end of 2006.

(Xinhua News Agency March 18, 2008)