China’s huge consumer market is catching the attention of companies from all over the world. Consequently, it is important for any company with an interest in China to secure its intellectual property protection, and also monitor its competitors’ patent-filing activities in the country.

In the past 18 months, Evalueserve has noted a substantial increase in the demand for patent research conducted in the major Asian languages – Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Prior Art Searches (36 percent of all patent projects) and Competitor Analysis services (25 percent of all patent projects) are especially in high demand. As a result, foreign companies are increasingly looking for service providers such as Evalueserve to search for and analyze non-English patent and non-patent databases.

All the members of Evalueserve’s Intellectual Property (IP) China team are fluent in Mandarin as well as English, and some also speak an additional language such as Korean or Japanese. In China, patent databases and a number of non-patent databases are available online only in Chinese. Evalueserve’s bi-lingual team is therefore able to search patent and non-patent databases, for example, the China Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), in the native language.

In China, the ability to search in East Asian languages is a valuable addition to English language searches. In addition, a bi-lingual team with a good grasp of English greatly facilitates communication of the analysis of prior art in English to American and European clients. Since English translations of patent databases are not always complete, its language capabilities enable Evalueserve to offer more accurate information to companies in Europe or the US, and provide them with research reports in English. As MNCs increasingly start looking at patenting their products in emerging markets, the unique research and analysis Evalueserve offers will give them a competitive advantage over other companies, which rely solely on English-language research.

“Searching the Chinese patent database and analyzing patent documents from a strategy perspective is what we are focusing on in China. We started out by helping Western law firms and corporations to understand China better. Very soon, we realized that it is imperative that patent or non-patent searches are carried out in Mandarin because English-language coverage is minimal in the country. In addition, to cater efficiently to the needs of local, as well as foreign clients, a patent research professional should be fluent in English and another Asian language and also have a technology background. We have seen that Shanghai and most parts of urban China have a large talent pool of English-speaking technology graduates. We are leveraging these capabilities and are training our team to effectively carry out prior art searches, patent landscape analysis and claims overlap analysis.” says Ram Deshpande, Senior Manager of the Intellectual Property division of Evalueserve China.

Evalueserve is the first KPO that started offering patent research services from China in September 2006. The team has since grown to 20 people, who work closely with more than 250 patent researchers at Evalueserve’s India office.