 Ladies and gentlemen, very good morning to you all, and thank you very much for coming. As Samar mentioned, Carsten Finke is here, our chief economist, and down at the back of the room is Mr. Masai Khan, who works under Carsten Finke as the head of our statistics area, and let me say that they've both done a fantastic job with this report. You've no idea how much work goes into compiling all these statistics from so many countries around the world, and we've tried to facilitate this digestion for you by in particular giving you some infographics, which are available at the end of the room, which record very simply the overall numbers for patents, trademarks, and industrial designs. There is, of course, the press release, and I will give you a couple of details of trends, if I may, sticking to the trends, and I'll try not to get too much into the numbers, but of course the trends have to be supported by the numbers, so I am sorry to have to make some reference to numbers. Okay, so as far as trends are concerned, I would say that the first major trend is the strength of the demand that one sees for intellectual property titles, and we cover, in this report, patents, utility models, trademarks, industrial designs, and plant variety rights. So if anyone wants any explanation as to the difference or what each is for, I'm very happy to provide it, or Carsten can provide it, but it's patents and utility models, which are for inventions really, trademarks for image, reputation, brands, industrial designs, the external appearance of objects, and plant variety rights, which are extremely important, but rather unknown form of intellectual property protection, which covers all the activity of traditional breeders, plant breeders. Okay, so the strength of demand is the first thing. What we notice is that in 2012, and that's what we're speaking about, the year 2012, we see patent farnings grow by 9.2% over the preceding year, industrial designs growing by 17%, utility models growing by 23.4%, and trademark class counts growing by 6%. So all of those percentages are of course well in excess of the rate of growth worldwide of the global economy, and well in excess I'd say of most economies, individual performance in terms of growth as well. One word of explanation, respect of the way in which we count, trademark, and industrial design applications, let me give you an illustration, in the case of a trademark, you might register it for one class of goods, for example cars, but you might extend it to other classes of goods, for example design in certain other areas, I'm thinking of Porsche as an example, and so you have within one application in many countries several classes of goods that are covered, but some countries permit you only to cover one class per application, so you have to file multiple applications to cover multiple classes. That being the case, in order to ensure comparability, we are counting applications for classes, and the same thing for industrial designs, and gives you just a better way of comparing different countries' performances. So the first thing, the first trend I would say is the continuing strength of the demand worldwide for intellectual property protection, which is an expression of course of the knowledge economy of the fact that competitive advantage comes from innovation, and the capturing of that competitive advantage and economic value of innovation by intellectual property. Second trend I suppose that I'd like to mention to you is again, and we've spoken of this repeatedly in previous years, the extent to which China features as just a major player in the world of intellectual property these days. When you look at patents for a start, well no, looking at all of the areas, China is the only office amongst the top five that recorded double digit growth for each of the four types of intellectual property mentioned by us, namely patents, trademarks, industrial designs and utility models, I'm not including plant varieties in that. So China is the only one of the major offices that recorded double digit growth in each area, first of all. Secondly, residents of China filed the largest number of applications. The Chinese residents filed 560,000 patent applications compared to looking at residents of Japan, 480,000, I'm giving you round figures, and the United States of America, 460,000. So there's another indication. The Chinese, they also filed the largest number of patent applications throughout the world as well for the first time in 2012. As an office, and here you deal with not just resident filings, but also with non-resident filings. As an office, it also received the largest number of patent applications worldwide. And there the figures, I don't want to get too much into figures, but the figures are 652,000 compared to 540,000 for the USPTO and 342,000 for the JPO. So that I'd say is another significant trend, it's just the strength of the demand in particular coming from China, and I've given you the patent figures, but if you looked at industrial designs for example, you would see that China received so far in excess of every other country in terms of numbers of applications, and it experienced a growth rate of 26%. Third trend is that we see good growth rates from a number of middle income countries. So if you look across the world, you see that the majority of patent filings occurred at the IP offices of high income countries, okay, that's 65% of patent filings occurred at the patent offices of high income countries. But in contrast, middle and low income countries accounted for the majority of trademark filing activity and the majority of industrial design filing activity. So middle and low income countries accounted for 52%, 53% of trademark filings, and 64% of design filings. And over the last five years, we see that all four types that I mentioned, that's leaving out plant varieties, so it's patents, utility models, trademarks, designs, all four types saw a shift in filing activity from high income to middle income, much of that driven by China. But there are other good examples of growth in middle income countries, and let me give you just a couple by way of example only. In terms of trademark applications, Turkey rose by 24.1% in 2012. In terms of industrial designs, Turkey also rose by 12.4%. In terms of industrial designs, also the Russian Federation experienced a 30% growth rate. So they're just some random examples. I think that I will leave my opening remarks at that point. Obviously there's a lot of numbers here. That's one word on plant varieties because we generally don't pay much attention to it. The largest number of plant variety applications originated in, guess which country? Flowers, the Netherlands, with 2,560, followed by the United States and then China. We don't usually speak about that. Anyway, I will leave my remarks at that stage at point, and Karsten, did you want to add? Maybe just very briefly, thank you, Director General. Just to clarify, we collect these data from intellectual property officers throughout the world, always the data that we publish is for the previous year. So this is our 2013 report that publishes data, the latest available data for 2012. I should say that in order to sort of not confuse things, last year when we published our 2012 report for data concerning 2011, we reported that China for the first time the Chinese Patent Office received more applications than any other patent office in the world. So in 2011, China overtook the United States Patent and Trademark Office as the largest office in the world. Today we are reporting that in 2012, China also became the largest filer in terms of Chinese residents filing all over the world. So this is just to make clear what is different that we are reporting today compared to a year ago. Also, as the Director General mentioned, we saw fast growth in patent filings worldwide in 2012. In fact, the growth rate was 9.2 percent, and that was the fastest growth that we've seen in 18 years. A lot of that driven by China, China, as I mentioned in 2011, was already the largest patent office in the world, and it further extended its lead. It saw growth by more than 20 percent in the case of patent filings. I should say also, though, and I think this is, I think, quite important that we also see significant growth in the United States at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, both from U.S. residents as well as non-residents, and this is in contrast to most European countries, which really have seen quite a mixed performance, and in some cases have even seen marked decline. So in broad terms, it clearly corresponds to, I would say, overall economic developments. Although I think in the United States, the growth rate that we saw in 2012 is also much faster than the growth rate of gross domestic product. But let me leave it there, if there are any questions. Thanks, Ed Girardet. Two questions. One, the reason behind, I mean, do you have any comment on why China and also the United States have far more patents this year and in recent years? Is this a mark of more imagination? Are the Europeans sipping behind? And my second question is with regard to plants. I mean, I assume Holland is really patenting all the tulips and so on, but what about indigenous plant species? Have you got any information on that with, say, pharmaceutical companies trying to patent an indigenous species? So on the first, look, I think there are multiple explanations. As a generalization, a broad generalization, patent applications tend to track economic performance as a broad generalization. And so that's part of the explanation for the trends that Carsten just gave. More specifically, of course, China is still in very much in a development mode. It is still developing its expertise in this area. So with enormous investment in research and development, it's the second largest investor in research and development in absolute terms in the world. Enormous investment in education and these investments in knowledge infrastructure, if you like, are also being reflected in the take up that we see in the use of the intellectual property system as well. For the United States of America, it's always been the predominant performer in science and technology for, since I suppose the Second World War, but I can't give you an exact date, but it is predominant performer. It's the largest investor in research and development worldwide, of course, not in absolute terms, not in percentage of GDP, but still a very significant percentage of GDP, and of course an extremely well-developed innovation ecosystem. So I think these explanations are reasonably, they're multiple explanations, but reasonably straightforward to see. In the case of Europe, I suppose it reflects the fact that economic performance has not yet really picked up, at least as not to the extent to which it seems to have picked up in the United States of America. As far as the second part of your question is concerned, plant variety and Carsten may wish to add to the first part, but the second part, plant variety protection, covers traditional breeding techniques, so it's selection of the best characteristics in the phenotype, the external appearance of the plant, and concentration of breeding with those particular characteristics to arrive at eventually a new variety. What you get more with the biotech pharmaceutical companies is a scientific intervention on the plant in terms of genetic engineering and genetic manipulation, and that would be expressed more in terms of patent applications than plant variety applications, which tend to cover the traditional breeding techniques that have been practiced by humans for thousands of years, actually. And that's one of the reasons why you also see a very strong participation in the plant breeders system, the plant variety system, by developing countries. Carsten, did you want to? No. Sorry. And Ketli? I've got two or three questions. So the first one is there was a problem of patent log, it's an ongoing problem. Do you have data in this report about patent log and is, for example, China experiencing the same problem as, for example, the USPTO has experienced over the last years? This is about filing. Does that mean are there any data on granting? Is that the number of filing application compared to the granting? And also this inflation of application, does this mean that there will be a problem of quality of patents? Well, there are a couple of, I'll start and Carsten will finish, what I don't cover. But look, I wouldn't call it so much as inflation. I think inflation is slight. It's not the word that I would choose, a strong demand, sure. Why? I think, obviously knowledge is a much more important component in production than it used to be. And we have, if you just compare the economy now to the way it was in the year 1900, for example, obviously the major difference is the influence and pervasion of technology and knowledge, the knowledge input to production. So a lot of that is coming out of this plus a heightened awareness of the value of innovation and its competitive advantage, what it can confer, and its contribution to economic growth. So I think that to some extent the demand surge is able to be explained by the way in which the economy has developed. Will the numbers lead to a reduced quality in application? Well, I think that is a legitimate apprehension that all patent officers share, actually. And the management of demand is a major, I think, challenge for patent officers worldwide and for WIPO. There are multiple tools that can be applied to deal with, to manage demand. The PCT is one such tool. Improved cooperation amongst patent officers is another tool, and that is expressed, for example, in the platform that WIPO has put together called WIPO case, which is centralised access to search and examination results, which was started originally with Australia, United Kingdom and Canada, but which Japan is in the process of monitoring a connection for at the moment, and which China has just signed on to be able to join in, and where Singapore is also joining in. So that's just one example of a tool or a platform that can help manage demand. I think everyone is very conscious of the need for good metrics of what constitutes quality in the patent area, and a lot of work is going on by the economists. We don't necessarily have answers just yet, Gaston. Thank you. Just a few words on backlogs and grants, what you asked about. You would find quite detailed number on so-called pending patent applications in the report, which in some sense give you a sense of the number of unprocessed patent applications. I think there we, I would say, report moderately good news in a sense that at three of the top four offices, we saw a decrease in the overall number of pending patent applications. We saw decreases in the case of Japan, in the case of Japan, the United States and the Republic of Korea, but we still saw an increase in the case of the European Patent Office, and this is all, when I talk about the top four offices, this is now the top four offices in terms of number of patents in force, and not in terms of annual number of patents received, where China is clearly the top office. I should say that I think, and I think especially in the United States, I think in the case of Japan, one of the reasons you see a decrease in the number of pending patent applications has to do with a sort of slowing growth in new filings, and in fact if you look at the trend over the last six or seven years, I think there even has been a slight decline, so that has also meant that the workload that the office has faced has become smaller. I think in the United States, it has a lot to do with investments that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has undertaken to manage its workload as well as policies to sort of more effectively process patent applications. As far as patent grants are concerned, again you would find all the detailed numbers in the report. We always tend to focus on applications because patent grants are largely sort of an outcome of office actions, and in particular if you look at patent grant data for a particular year, you would find that these granted patents have been filed at different years, and that could go back up to 10 years, so it's difficult to sort of associate patent grant data with let's say innovation trends or the economic cycles because they largely sort of reflect an outcome of office decisions. The headline number is that for the first time in 2012, the total number of patent grants exceeded one million, growth was 13.7% on 2011, and that was mainly due to growth in grants issued by the Japan Patent Office, by the Chinese Patent Office, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Thank you. Quick question. You mentioned China being the biggest filer in the world, I think. Where can we find this number, and whether we can have like, I don't know, the 10 largest filers in the world, not only in a particular country, and still on the emerging countries. Some years ago we were talking about counterfeiting, piracy, et cetera, now we're talking about how these same countries are using patents. The patents are on innovation or on copies? While Castan is casting about, let me refer to these two pages, and this will give you half of your answer, not the complete part. And if you look at the bottom of patents growth, and you see Cypo, you see top five offices, okay, Cypo is China, it's state intellectual property office, and if you go to the bottom of the trademarks, you see the same thing again, Cypo, plus 16.5%, and if you go on to industrial designs, you see the same thing again, Cypo in green, so that's number of applications that they received. A different question of yours, which was your real question, I think is, how many were filed by China, Castan, or by Chinese residents? And I've got those figures here, but Castan, I'll show you where you can find them. Yeah, very easy, it's on page 58 of the report, it's figure A.3.1.2, it's called equivalent patent applications for the top 20 origins, so there you would find the top 20. And you see China being the number one followed by Japan, United States of America, Republic of Korea, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russian Federation, and Netherlands are the top 10. We can also, all of the data will soon be available on the webpage, so you can, there's so many ways of looking at these data, and I know it's not easy to digest, but all the data are going to be public, and we are happy to also compile the data in a way that it is useful for you. On on your other question, it's not really possible to say without a scientific analysis, which necessarily would take a huge amount of time to look at the type of applications that are coming out of the different emerging countries and how they have, what sort of results they're achieving, but I think you're right, what we see in general, of course, with this greater participation and use of the, in and use of the intellectual property system by the emerging countries, is that a problem like counterfeiting or a problem like piracy also are becoming shared problems, they're becoming shared problems worldwide, whereas once we might have regarded them as problems of the North, I think now they are shared problems. Please. Wu Cheng of Xinhua News Agency, Mr. Director General, it's mentioned that China focused the patent filings on material metallurgy technologies, while in contrast, US focused more on the computer and the medical technologies fields. What does that indicate and are there any changes in recent years in terms of China's focus on the filing fields? If I may, I think your question is based on the statistics that we published in the reports on our so-called relative specialization index, which compares how countries are doing in particular fields of technology in relative terms, and what that tries to do is to essentially make data comparable across countries, and you would, for example, find it very difficult to compare, say, Luxembourg to China, because by sheer size, China filed so many more patents compared to Luxembourg, and for this reason we have come up with this relative specialization index that tries to sort of capture the technological edge that countries have in different areas of technology in relative terms, and that's quite important. While you, for example, would find that in the area of digital communication, Finland, and probably not altogether surprising, comes out on top, it's still the case that Chinese residents file many more patents in the field of digital communications compared to Finland, so I think that has to be kept in mind. As far as countries' performance in these relative specialization indices are concerned, again, I think you look at this, and some are clearly not surprising. You would find India being strong in organic fine chemistry. You would find China doing well in digital communications, and you mentioned materials and mentality, but I think part of the purpose is a bit of a journalistic purpose here, is that we compile these indices, we certainly don't know what's going on in every country, but you may find it interesting to write about this with more insights on what may be behind these numbers. Coming back to the filings, how many of these are defensive filings by corporations, and you don't seem to, again, have the data on abuse of IP to compare with the filings. In other words, is the motivation basically a defensive element in a lot of these increases, and is there a correlation between increases in filings and countries where there's a track record of a lot of counterfeit? Well, I think it's a very difficult question to answer, and it's very difficult to have that data, because how do you judge what is a defensive filing as opposed to an offensive filing, and how do you judge what is an abusive filing means it's possible to do it sometimes in retrospect with respect to a particular category of application or with respect to a particular filer's behavior. But take, if I may say, the example of patent trolls, you know, patent trolls, or if you'd like patent assertion entities, the difficulty there is, you know, how do you define what a troll is, or what a patent assertion entity is? What we know is that the patent assertion entity's primary interest is on the exclusive right conferred by a patent, and not on the underlying knowledge. So they tend not to be working that knowledge in a productive manner in the economy, but tend to be focusing on making money out of the exclusive right through litigation. Now if you want to define that, how are you going to define that to exclude universities? Because universities, generally speaking, are interested more in the underlying knowledge and less in the exclusive right, they usually often, you know, outsource the commercialization of the knowledge to someone else, but they're nevertheless taking rights in respect of the underlying knowledge. So we have a major definitional problem, I think, that we're grappling with, and you can see in the United States they're grappling with that at the moment. There are multiple bills introduced into Congress. The White House is very active in looking at the whole question of patent assertion entities, and the professional and industrial organizations, associations are taking positions in relation to this. So I think we've got work to do before we can get a good definition that'll enable us to be able to answer your questions prospectively, as opposed to retrospectively looking at something that happened, you know, five years ago. But do we have some kind of, some trends of patent violations, just to give a mirror image of where this growth, if there's also increase in patent violations, if there's a correlation here. And I think some countries, the definition of what is counterfeit is different, it clashes between countries. In some countries it's only considered illegal if X number of items are pirated, whereas in other countries a single product would be subject to litigation. In some dynamic economies there could be thousands before you're in breach of the law. Well, I mean I can only say that there is some information out there on the extent of patent litigation in different countries. I know, for example, in the case of China, you would find information also on trends. We don't collect these data, that's partly a matter of capacity, but it's also a matter of comparability across countries, and a matter of that in some countries these data clearly don't exist and it's not always clear who collects these data, because often litigation takes place at the sub-federal level. So that's one challenge. And I think the other challenge is that you would find some data on litigation, but that's sort of only the tip of the iceberg as far as intellectual property disputes are concerned. There are a lot of disputes that are settled before it actually comes to the litigation stage and those really sort of escape statistical measurement simply because they don't leave any public record. If you want to, we can point you to some sources here and there that at least for some countries give you statistics on patent litigation. You mentioned you're not collecting or tracking any of these violations, but if I'm not mistaken, you're part of the initiative with the WHO and Interpol in the area of pharmaceuticals, are you not? Which initiative? The cooperative arrangement between WHO, WIPO and Interpol. In respect of what? Of pharmaceutical, quality of pharmaceuticals. That is to say we are participating in, from an expert, in providing expert assistance, yes, but we're not running that one, yeah. Who is these days? Well, I think WHO is. Are they? Yeah. Okay. Just for our clarification, we need to say that for the first time China tops the ranking for both sources and the destination in four categories of IPs. It means that for the first time in each of the four categories, it becomes the number one and in the past already in some category it was already number one. No, not quite. What I meant to say was that China was the only office of the top five who experienced double digit growth in all areas of patents, utility models, trademarks and designs. So that was one thing. But in addition, I said that in 2012, for the first time, residents of China accounted for the largest number of patent applications filed around the world in the patent area. I think that's probably true of trademarks too, I'm not sure about that. It's certainly in China, yes, but worldwide I think, yes also. Maybe if I could expand, again, there are two ways of looking at these data. You can either look at these data by the office that receives these applications or you can look at these data by residents who file IP rights on a worldwide basis. You first look at the data broken down by office, you would find that in 2011, China sort of took the top spot for all four forms of intellectual property, patents, utility models, industrial designs and trademarks. In the case of trademarks, I know that China took over the top spot in 2001, so it hadn't exactly a decade before it happened in the case of patents. So as of 2011, China was the top, the Chinese intellectual property office, one should be even more correct in saying there are actually two offices in China, one responsible for patents, designs and utility models and the other one responsible for trademarks. But those offices as of 2011 were really the offices receiving the greatest amount of applications in the world. In the case of the data broken down by origin, that essentially for all four offices only happened in 2012. In the case of trademarks, it also happened earlier, I can't tell you exactly when, but we can certainly look that up, we have that data. But as of 2012, it happened in the case of patents and that's why we can now say it applies to all four forms of intellectual property. Where is the stats on the trademarks in the report? Page 99. Got it. So patents are starting on page 1999, you would find those. Just if I can take advantage of this opportunity for making questions to Director General about the General Assembly that starts tomorrow, what are the sticking point of this General Assembly and what is your prospect of solving the problem successfully? Well, I think the two main issues that are under consideration are the convocation of a diplomatic conference to conclude the proposed design law treaty in June 2014 and the question of external offices. Now, not a subsidiary, but a consequential question has been the program and budget, because both of those issues arise in the context of the program and budget. And so the program budget is a third issue, but I think if you solve the first two, you solve the program budget. How are we placed? Well, I think intensive consultations have been taking place over the last two to three weeks, led in the case of external offices by Ambassador Kwok Fook-Seng of Singapore and in the case of a design law treaty by Mr. Marcelo de la Niña of Brazil. And they have, I think, done some extraordinarily good work and both of those items have progressed, but have not yet been resolved, okay? So I think good progress has been made, but a resolution has not yet been arrived at, but we hope that that resolution will be reached in the coming two or three, actually, days. Thank you.