companies from the us are slowly catching up with rivals from japan when it comes to filing patent applications in china.

figures from the state intellectual property office (sipo) show that last year it received 20,395 applications from the us, compared with 36,221 from japan.

this year, us companies applied for 13,410 patent rights in the first seven months of 2006, while japanese companies applied for 21,678, suggesting that the gap is slowly narrowing between the us and japan.

only one us company – ibm – made it onto the list of top 10 patent filers in china last year, which is dominated by japanese and korean companies. philips was the only other non-asian company on the list, which consisted of samsung electronics, matsushita, sony, lg, toshiba, seiko, samsung sdi and canon.

the top 10 patent filing countries in china from january 1 2006 to july 31 are, in order: japan, the us, korea, germany, the netherlands, france, switzerland, the uk, italy and sweden.