European Patent Office (EPO): Facts, figures and services for researchers and inventors

The European Patent Office (EPO) supports innovation, competitiveness and economic growth across Europe through a commitment to high quality and efficient services delivered under the European Patent Convention (EPC). The EPO provides protection for an invention in up to 40 European countries on the basis of a single application. In the states for which it is granted, a European patent has the same legal effect as a national patent. The EPO provides applicants for a European patent with a detailed search report, and a written opinion on an invention's patentability, within just a few months from filing. Companies seeking a global market can also file an international ("PCT") application, choosing the EPO as their search authority. The EPO's public databases - containing over 90 million patent documents with information about inventions and technical developments - are one of the world's most abundant sources of information about technology. Patent Translate, the EPO's free machine translation service, covers 32 languages. It enables automatic translation from and into English, French or German for 27 other European languages (covering all the EPO member states), plus from and into English for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. In 2014 the top 5 countries of origin were the US, Japan, Germany, China and South Korea. Samsung headed the list of the largest applicants at the EPO in 2014, followed by Siemens and Philips. Among the ten most active filers, five companies came from Europe, three from Asia, and two from the US. Medical Technology was the field with the highest volume of applications followed by Electrical Machinery & Energy, both having about 10000 patent applications.