How popular is the unitary patent?

Four months into the UPC, how popular is the European patent with unitary effect (the unitary patent)?

Together with the Unified Patent Court itself, the unitary patent is of course the other key feature of the new system that began on 1 June. Furthermore, the unitary patent can only be enforced or revoked in the UPC. Therefore, the numbers electing to convert their classic European patents into a unitary patents after grant is a good indicator of the confidence of patent owners in the system.

At the moment, however, good statistics relating to the UPC are still hard to come by. So what can be worked out about unitary patent uptake? As explained at Taylor Wessing's Pharma Forum 2023: Patents Special on 3 October, we can make an educated guess.

As the graph from the EPO's Statistics and Trends Centre shows, at the end of September, four months into the life of the UPC and the unitary patent, approximately 10,000 unitary patents had been registered at the EPO. But what does this figure mean in the context of total European patent grants?

We do not have published figures for European patent grants in 2023 so far, but we can draw some conclusions from past figures. The number of European patent grants in the EPO has varied dramatically in the past four years, from between nearly 138,000 in 2019 and nearly 82,000 in 2022, but if these and the number of yearly grants in between are averaged out the figure is approximately 115,000 patents per year.

This means that, if current unitary patent registration rates are kept up until 1 June 2024, they will represent approximately 26% of all patents granted by the EPO – one in four patents.

Before the UPC opened, many had thought it would be unpopular and that patentees would not opt for unitary patents given that these compel enforcement in the system and the risk of UPC-wide revocation. This rate of uptake seems to indicate otherwise.