On April 22, China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) said the country accepted a larger proportion of invention patent applications in 2013.

Shen Changyu, head of the SIPO, said China accepted 2.38 million patent applications and authorized 1.31 million of the cases last year. The number of patent applications for inventions reached 825,000, up 26.3 percent year on year.

It is the first time in five years that invention patent applications took up more than one third of the three types of applications, Shen commented at a press conference. The other two types are utility models and design.

China ranked third in international patent applications to the Patent Cooperation Treaty, with more than 20,000 submissions last year.