The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippine (IPOPHL) said it will likely hit P1 billion in gross earnings from intellectual property (IP) fillings and other fees this year, banking on hopes that the performance in the last quarter will help them exceed the P930 million recorded during the previous year.
Director General Rowel Barba told reporters last week that they already reached P980 billion in gross earnings as of last September, surpassing last year’s record as well as that of the prepandemic record of around P850 million in 2019.
“Based on the IPOPHL historical records, the volume of fillings during the last quarter is higher. So, that’s why we are confident that we will be reaching (P1billion this year), Barba said on the sidelines of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Summit at the Manila Mariott Hotel in Pasay City.
The IP-rights body is targeting a 10 percent increase in filings this year, after reaching 48,0000 filings in 2022, a volume of listing which has already topped that of prepandemic levels.
During the first half of the year, IP applications dropped by a little more than 5 percent as the number of trademarks registrations fell in tandem with the economic slowdown during the period.
Back in August, the IPOPHL said that filings—which includes registrations for patents, utility models (UM), industrial designs (ID), and trademarks—fell to 22,203 from the 23,494 recorded during the comparable period in 2022.
Patent registrations increased by 9 percent to 2,134 from 1,958, with applications from non-resident accounting for 90 percent of the total.
Most of these are in pharmaceutics, comprising 24.47 percent of the total, while 10.58 percent are in organic fine chemistry, and 7.89 percent in digital communications.