In 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic during which Australia’s two most populous cities spent long weeks under conditions of strict lockdown, the number of Australian standard patent applications filed by Australian resident applicants jumped by over 25%, to levels unseen since a rush on filings prompted by the Raising the Bar patent law reforms in 2013. While there may have been a number of contributing factors, including the phase-out of the second tier innovation patent system in August 2021, it is nonetheless fair to say that there was no indication of any downturn in Australian filings as a result of the pandemic.
So what about international applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT)? Filing a PCT application is generally a more costly exercise than filing a domestic application, and usually signals the applicant’s intent to proceed with national applications in multiple countries. Therefore the number of PCT applications filed might be a better indicator of the economic impact of the pandemic on innovative Australian businesses and institutions. Unfortunately, information about a PCT application does not usually become publicly available until 18 months after the initial priority date which, in turn, is anywhere between six and 18 months after the PCT application itself was filed. As a result, it is only recently that it has become possible to observe any impact of the pandemic on PCT filings.
In this article, I present data on PCT filings by Australian resident applicants that have been published up until the end of August 2022, with numbers extrapolated for the full 2022 calendar year. What the data shows is that there has been no substantial effect, either positive or negative, on the total number of PCT applications filed annually by Australian residents since the start of the pandemic. Drilling down to the fields of technology covered by the applications filed, there are a number of ongoing trends that predate the pandemic. For example, applications relating to IT methods for management and civil engineering have continued pre-existing declines, while pharmaceuticals appear to be experiencing a period of growth. The one field in which there may be a specific pandemic-related effect is medical technology (e.g. devices and instruments), in which the number of published PCT applications has notably increased since 2020.