The importance of Brazil to patent applicants around the world is undeniable. It is the most important patent country in Latin America from a quantitative perspective. We took our data at Patent-Pilot to find out which foreign jurisdictions are highly connected with Brazilian patent law firms.
Here is what we found when looking at the numbers between 2015 and today (August 2019):
Brazilian firms received 28,961 patent cases from other countries during this time frame, and they sent 1,700 patent cases to firms abroad over the same period. In other words, they received 17 times more patent work than they sent. In terms of number of cases sent, Brazil is in position 26 worldwide, while in the 10th position for cases received. This clearly demonstrates the high importance of the Brazilian market for international patent protection.
The United States is by far the most important partner country: 450 cases sent from Brazil (26% of all cases sent) and 11,534 received (40% of all cases received).
Next are Germany (69 and 3,864), Japan (84 and 2,440), France (17 and 1,833) and Great Britain (52 and 1,459). Looking at Europe overall, Brazilian representatives sent 256 and received 11,969. When considering European countries together, they are of similar importance as the United States.
Brazil’s patent case exchange with other Latin American countries is different: Brazilian firms sent out more (362 cases) than they received (102).
Please note: Only published filings are taken into account for this research. There are, of course, a number of unpublished filings missing from the data.
The figures are based on a database provided by the European Patent Office (DOCDB), which covers filings from all around the world. However, there are some countries ( India, Thailand, and Vietnam, for example) where the dataset appears to be incomplete.
