 Your Excellency Ambassador Yarnes Carclons, the chair of the WIPO General Assembly, Honourable Ministers. Your Excellencies, the permanent representatives and ambassadors and distinguished delegates. It's a great pleasure for me to join the chair in extending a very warm welcome to all delegations to this series of the WIPO assemblies. I should like at the outset to thank all of the member states for their support for the organisation which I think is so apparent in the large number of delegates who are present this morning as well as in the extensive range of activities, cultural and professional activities that member states have so generously agreed to support and to sponsor throughout this week. I should like to thank Ambassador Carclons for his great commitment throughout this year as chair of the WIPO General Assembly to the preparation of the 2017 assemblies and to ensuring a positive outcome of this meeting. I take the opportunity also to thank all of the other chairs or the chairs of other WIPO governing bodies, the committees and the working groups for the amount of time that they have made available to the organisation and for their dedication in guiding the work of the organisation. I'm very pleased to report that the membership of the organisation has expanded by three to 191 states now with the accessions of the Cook Islands, the Marshall Islands and Timor Leste. And I extend a very warm welcome to these new member states of the organisation. Like the membership of WIPO, the number of accessions to the various treaties administered by the organisation has grown in a pleasing manner throughout the past 12 months. A milestone will be reached this week with the accession of Indonesia to become the 100th contracting party to the Madrid protocol. So I thank Indonesia for this and thank the minister who is present with us this morning. The Madrid protocol joins now the WIPO Convention, the Paris Convention, the Berne Convention and the PCT as the fifth treaty administered by the organisation which has 100 or more contracting parties. There are several other treaties which have a number of contracting parties in the 90s and so I think we are on track towards meeting the target in the medium term strategic plan of having 12 treaties administered by the organisation with more than 100 contracting parties. The financial position of the organisation continues to be robust with very good results achieved in the first year of the current biennium of 2016-2017. In 2016 we finished the year with an overall surplus of 32 million Swiss francs that compared to the result in the preceding year 2015 of an overall surplus of 33 million Swiss francs and since we are now in October we are reasonably confident that this year 2017 the second year in the biennium will see a comparable result to that achieved last year. The good results of the last several years have enabled us to build the net assets of the organisation. They stood at the end of 2016 at 311 million Swiss francs compared to 279 million Swiss francs at the end of the preceding year 2015. In particular we have been able to build the liquid component of net assets thus going a long way towards meeting the target set by the member states for the reserves to move from 22% to 25% of biennial expenditure. The draft program and budget for the next biennium 2018-2019 is before the member states and the assemblies for approval. We are projecting an increase in revenue, an estimated increase in revenue of 10.4% but we have contained our request for authorization for expenditure to an increase of 2.7%. In particular in line with the consistent requests from member states we have contained the increase in staff costs to 0.8% which we consider to be an achievement in the context of rapid growth for the services of the organisation. For now the fifth consecutive biennium we are not proposing any fee increases for our global IP systems and we are not proposing any increase in staff posts. The positive and stable I would say financial condition of the organisation has been driven of course by continually rising demand for intellectual property throughout the world but we should also acknowledge I think the role played by the attractiveness and the soundness of the global IP systems administered by the organisation namely the patent cooperation treaty, the Madrid system for Marx and the Hague system for designs that have been put in place over the life of this organisation. These systems provide the best means for managing the rising demand for intellectual property worldwide and they also provide the best means for obtaining effective intellectual property protection in the global market. They are the financial lifeblood of the organisation but they do depend upon member state participation. That participation has been steadily increasing with now 152 contracting parties to the PCT, soon 100 to the Madrid system and 52 to the latest act of the Hague system. But there is still a long way to go with important parts of the world that missing or absent and none of the systems has reached its full potential. I would urge all member states to consider very seriously the benefits of the systems and the possibility of joining them if they have not already done so. In an organisation where member state contributions account for only about 4% of the revenue of the organisation and where these global IP systems account for about 93% of the revenue of the organisation, participation in the systems I think represents a most welcome and appreciated expression of engagement in and commitment to the organisation. Looking to the future, there are several features of the intellectual property landscape that I should like to mention which suggests possible new orientations for the organisation in the medium and longer term. The first of those is innovation which of course lies at the heart of the mission of intellectual property. Innovation has been or is or has become a central element in the economic strategy of a wide spectrum of countries not just the most advanced technologically but also middle income in other countries seeking to transform economies to a more sustainable basis of value addition. Its fundamental importance has been recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals in SDG 9 and as a capacity and a strategy that applies to all sectors of the economy, agriculture, industry, the service sector, the digital economy, the creative industries. Innovation provides an opportunity for the organisation to contribute to all of the SDGs. In line with SDG 17 which seeks to encourage partnerships to strengthen the implementation of the SDGs, we have several successful public private partnerships. These contribute to the SDGs in a variety of ways. The accessible books consortium contributes to quality education. WIPO research contributes to good health and well-being. The various partnerships we have with scientific, technical and medical publishers contribute to innovation, quality education and several other goals and WIPO green contributes to climate action. On Tuesday of this week that is tomorrow we shall launch a new public private partnership with the pharmaceutical industry called the Patent Information Initiative for Medicines. Through this initiative we will make available data on the legal status of patents on medicines which is something that has been called for quite some time by amongst others the non-governmental sector because it will assist in the efficient procurement of medicines and in determining freedom to operate. The Global Innovation Index which the organisation publishes annually with INSED and Cornell University together with a number of other knowledge partners has established itself now as the leading reference for measuring innovation capacity and performance throughout the world. It also provides a very good basis for us, the secretariat to engage with member states that wish to use the index as a means of improving their innovation capacity and we have successfully partnered with a number of developing countries in the course of the last 12 months in this way. Innovation as I think we are all very much aware is occurring now at an accelerating speed which produces a number of challenges for institutional and governance frameworks throughout the world. Amongst them is the challenge confronting the judiciary of dealing with intellectual property cases that throw up novel questions as a consequence of technological changes that may not yet have been considered or dealt with by legislatures. So we have noticed especially in the last 12 months an increasing demand from member states for engagement in respect of both the exchange of information amongst judiciaries and capacity building in jurisdictions that have been less exposed to intellectual property questions in the past. This development I think opens a new orientation for the organisation for most of the history of the organisation it has been concerned with the executive administration of intellectual property and this opens the possibility of the organisation also addressing the judicial administration of intellectual property and we will move to meet these demands from the member states within the secretariat in a more systematic way. It will involve activities that might fall into the category of capacity building such as the distance learning programme that is being developed together with a number of judges by the WIPO academy. The creation of a space for exchanges of best practices amongst judiciaries and the use of information technology to increase the availability of information about judicial systems and decisions in the field of intellectual property throughout the world. In this last respect we have commenced an exercise with the Supreme Court of the People's Republic of China as well as with several countries in Latin America for making available leading decisions in the field of intellectual property with access being improved through the use of our artificial intelligence based machine language translation system. I think we have made enormous progress in the last years in our global databases and information technology platforms for cooperation amongst officers in various end areas such as office automation, statistics, the digital exchange of priority documents and the exchange of search and examination results. We believe that these have now matured into a WIPO what might be called a WIPO knowledge network where the member states are sharing data. The organisation is organising the accessibility or the availability of that data through databases or through IT platforms and various knowledge products are built on the basis of the data so shared and so made available either by the secretariat through our reports on statistics and economics or by outside parties since all of these data are made available through an open access and open data policy. And I think that this now constitutes a very important global asset for policy makers, the academic, scientific and research communities, for practitioners and for the general public. A final area that I shall mention where I believe that the organisation should commence to engage although perhaps with baby steps is the rapidly developing area of big data, the internet of things and artificial intelligence. Now the area of course has enormous implications and a multiplicity of dimensions many of which lie well beyond the focus of intellectual property and I think considerable care will need to be exercised to ensure that we do not stray from the mandate of the organisation. But one focus of attention could be the increasing use of artificial intelligence in intellectual property administration. We have developed several applications in this regard in translation as I have mentioned in classification and in image searching and I know the number of other intellectual property officers are likewise working on different applications. So in order to keep intellectual property administration abreast of the latest technological developments it would be useful to develop, if we were to develop mechanisms for sharing information about our respective work as well as for taking advantage of each other's work and avoiding duplication. A different side of the coin is the impact of the classical intellectual property system on big data and artificial intelligence and in particular how is the intellectual property system performing in this area in the discharge of its basic mission of encouraging innovation, encouraging and diffusing innovation. There are many questions here of course and our knowledge base is only just developing. But it may be useful to advance our common understanding of the questions through more international exchanges of information on developments and practices. I would like to thank once again the member states for all of their support which I think ensures the vitality and the success of the organisation and I would like also to pay tribute to my colleagues the staff of WIPO for their dedicated and professional work. We have many fine professionals in the secretariat of WIPO who have contributed to the excellent progress that's been made and to some outstanding achievements. Thank you very much.