Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning!
It is my great pleasure to attend IP China 2007 – The 3rd China Integrated Circuit and Software Intellectual Property Summit and the 4th China Information Industry Intellectual Property and Technical Standard Summit Forum. I’m pleased to see that so many intellectual property research institutions, supporting institutions and administration institutions pay high attention and show strong support to this summit. This is a very good activity. On behalf of Ministry of Information Industry, I’d like to extend my sincere congratulations to the opening of this summit and warm welcome to all representatives of the summit.

Encouraged by the spirit of the 16th CPC National Congress, with the clear strategic guidelines of “taking information industry as the priority”, information industry has maintained rapid growth and is playing an increasingly important role in national economy. It is undoubted that information industry has become China’s pillar industry and fundamental industry. From sales revenue, product output to intellectual property ownership, information industry exhibited excellent development momentum in last year. It will maintain the fast development momentum in this year.

As is proposed in the 17th CPC National Congress, China will promote the integration of informationization and industrialization. In building the high & new-tech industry system, China specially take information industry as the priority industry. To develop high & new-tech industry, we must pay attention to its technical connotation. The compilation of national independent innovation strategy has won strong recognition from the enterprise circle.

Attaching importance to independent intellectual property is actually an important contribution to information technology development. Since the development of information industry requires heavy technical investment, if the intellectual property formed in the investment could not receive proper protection, no enterprise will devote itself passionately to technical research and development. Therefore, promoting intellectual property protection is a must for the stable development of the industry. In the fast development of information industry, intellectual property plays an important role. Intellectual property activities are very active in the information industry. Intellectual property plays an important role in protecting inventions and creations, encouraging technical innovation, and creating fair competition environment. Besides, international competitiveness of information industry relies more and more on effective intellectual property protection and utilization, and industrial core competitiveness is collectively reflected by the ownership and operation capability of intellectual property. Accelerating intellectual property strategy implementation becomes the inner demand of information industry.

We can see that strengthening intellectual property protection and enhancing operation capability have become the common understanding of the whole industry. Since the establishment of intellectual property system, China has achieved great progress in intellectual property creation, protection and application. Before the reform and opening-up, the development of China’s information technology mainly relied on its own system, which included research institutes and universities, to carry out technical research, create technologies and form standards which were then adopted by enterprises to make production. When China opened up, we had big gaps with developed countries and could not develop if we didn’t integrate our information technology with international standard. Therefore, we have to adopt advanced international standard and take part in international competition and cooperation as quickly as possible.

In recent years, China’s information technology exhibits the trend of large market capacity and thriving consumption demands. Therefore, creating technologies demanded by Chinese users is what our enterprises should do. Ministry of Information Industry has published patent trend for nine consecutive years, the purpose of which is to urge enterprises to attach more importance to intellectual property work, which has achieved excellent effect. Besides, we’ve spent about eight years on standard promotion, leading to continuous improvement of the standardization work of information industry.

How to segment intellectual property protection and creation is a topic to be researched. With our unremitting efforts, since the tenth five-year plan, the annual increase of IT patent applications reached 29.6%; the patent applications of information industry accounted for over 1/3 of China’s total patent applications; and the ratio between invention patent applications and utility model applications of the information industry reached 2:1, much higher than the general ratio of 1:1 in China. This is consistent with industrial scale growth in China. According to last year’s statistics, as a pillar industry, it accounts for 7.5% of GDP and 1/3 of total import & export of China. These indicate that information industry is a highly internationalized industry. For example, we have established a series of technical standards with independent intellectual property like TD-SCDMA and WAPI in computer communication digital audio-visual area and digital home network area. In international market, Chinese enterprises are everywhere and bring our latest technologies to all relevant application areas of the world.

Besides achievements, we should also notice the difficulties and challenges in our intellectual property work. Domestically speaking, the main problem is that enterprises lack of intellectual property creation and application capability and are still exploring and learning intellectual property strategy planning and operation; intellectual property creation, protection, management and application are to be unified and coordinated. Intellectual property creation and protection are very important, so is intellectual property application. If intellectual property is not fully utilized, it loses its value. We should find out how to encourage enterprises to use intellectual property.

When communicating with international companies, we find that information technology and industrial development play an active role in global competition and cooperation. In industrial chain area, we have product cooperation, technical cooperation and in-depth industrial chain cooperation. For example, some big foreign companies come to China after having developed core chips because China has a bigger market and good manufacturing environment. In other words, they turn their technology into products in China and put into market. As we all know, for a product, one who owns its core technology especially monopoly technology, he earns monopoly profit. In the whole process, whole-machine processing only has a small margin, while intellectual property fee is usually charged in the final stage. If the fee is charged proportionally, then the cost of the whole-machine processing enterprises will increase substantially. In such a case, enterprises may not be able to spare money for R&D and buy fewer chips. In this way, technology couldn’t be fully utilized. What’s more confusing is that though many Chinese enterprises attach high importance to intellectual property, they sign contracts and make payments without knowing what kind of protection they get and what intellectual property rights they obtain. Therefore, we should make more research on intellectual property creation, protection, management and application.

CPC and central government have attached high importance to intellectual property work. The 17th CPC National Congress restated to accelerate the implementation of intellectual property strategy and put forward new requirements for information industry intellectual property work. In the eleventh five-year plan period, the intellectual property work of information industry shall take scientific outlook as the guidance, in conformity of the guidelines of “participation, guidance, encouragement, precaution and service”, to establish the enterprise-centered, market-oriented, and industry-university-research-application integrated intellectual property operation system, to substantially enhance enterprises’ capability of intellectual property creation and application.

We will focus on promoting the following work:
1. Work out the implementation guidelines for information industry intellectual property strategy to fulfill National Intellectual Property Strategy, and propose intellectual property guarantee measures, to enhance enterprises’ intellectual property creation and application capability.
2. Integrate resources of relevant industrial institutions, alliances and associations to build intellectual property working platform, further perfect intellectual property service system, and quickly enhance the polymerization of information industry intellectual property service.
3. Strengthen service, encourage relevant institutions to establish IT patent information management and patent dynamic monitoring system, accelerate the in-depth exploitation of patent information resource, and strengthen the publishing, follow-up and analysis of intellectual property information of key products and technologies.
4. Promote the integration of standard compilation work and intellectual property work, support independent technical results to apply for domestic and overseas patents, integrate independent technologies into international standard, and promote industry with standard, to form virtuous interaction between IP standard and industrial development and provide better technical applications for consumers.
5. Establish international intellectual property affairs coordination mechanism; carry out patent appraisal before implementing key scientific research and industrialization projects, establish intellectual property management systems in compliance with WTO rules, establish effective contacts with domestic and overseas institutions, promote cooperation between domestic and overseas intellectual property administration departments, and enhance the interaction capability of domestic intellectual property with international intellectual property.

Ministry of Information Industry initiated the intellectual property summit forum in 2003 and launched the software and integrated circuit intellectual property conference in 2005. These events have won strong support from you. This is a good platform, through which we can make research and discussion on intellectual property creation, protection and application. After all, information industry is still a rising industry, we should learn advanced foreign management experience, further expand reform and opening-up, and carry out sufficient cooperation. China’s information technology and industry must integrate into international environment. I hope this summit will give us effective suggestions to provide reference for our future work.

Thank you very much!