Technology innovative capabilities of China's automobile industry: A patent perspective

This paper analyses the technology innovative capabilities of China's automobile industry based on SIPO patent data. In the first part, this paper presents the compendium of basic facts of trends of automobile patents in China. Automobile patents not only increased expeditiously in the new millennium but also with an obvious escalating of technologies. In the second part, this paper conducts comparative research on the patenting behavior of China's top ten automobile enterprises. The main findings can be summarized as follows: (1) Automobile firms with different ownerships have distinct patenting characteristics. (2) Most of the automobile joint ventures own nearly no patents at all. Foreign parent enterprises keep a firm hand on key technologies with little, if any, spill over to joint ventures. (3) Start-up endogenous innovative automobile firms have become an important stream of technology innovation strength in China. However, in comparison with their foreign counterparts, they still have a long way to go.