Top patent award winners announced

Forty gold medals issued to high-quality innovators

The China National Intellectual Property Administration announced 40 winners of China's top patent awards on Tuesday to encourage high-quality innovation and development, officials said.

Co-organized by CNIPA and the World Intellectual Property Organization, 30 were granted gold medals for inventions covering energy, electronics, food, medicine and agriculture, and 10 for industrial designs at the ceremony for the WIPO-CNIPA Awards for Outstanding Chinese Patented Invention and Industrial Design.

This year, the administration also granted silver awards for 59 inventions and 15 industrial designs, according to Shen Changyu, commissioner of CNIPA.

"The increasing number of awards is consistent with the continuous rise in the number and quality of patents in China and the trend of high-quality development," Shen said.

This year's gold medal winners generated 83.5 billion yuan ($12.11 billion) in combined sales, 13.9 billion yuan in profits and 18.6 billion yuan in exports by the end of 2017, Shen said.

This strongly supports the high-quality development of industrial companies to approach overseas markets, he said.

One of the winners is a photovoltaic driving system and controlling method developed by Gree Electric Appliances. The system adopts a light source-based technology to replace the conventional electricity source with solar power in the operation of air conditioners.

Air conditioners consume large amounts of electricity and tend to result in resource consumption and environmental pollution, said Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman and president of Gree.

"For this, we want to develop our technology through innovation and with the philosophy of energy conservation and environmental protection," Dong said.

Gree's air conditioners equipped with this technology have the capacity to reduce average annual emissions by 2.52 million metric tons and conserve energy worth 520 million yuan. To date, the patented technology has been applied to 23 countries and more than 5,000 projects in the world, according to the company.

"If we want to become a world leader, we must have strong technology to serve the world," she said.

An innovative technology developed by a research team led by Ni Yuanying, a professor of the college of food science and nutritional engineering at China Agriculture University, was also on the winner list.

She led her team to develop a low temperature storage method for concentrated apple juice in large volumes, which has been used in juice packaging and transportation in an aseptic environment.

"We started the project during the 10th Five-Year Plan period (2001-05) and cooperated with a company to commercialize our research results," Ni said.

To date, the award-winning technology has helped to earn 3.83 billion yuan in export and has provided jobs for 2 million farmers, increasing their income by 4.47 billion yuan, she said.

"The award is a great affirmation to our years of research work and cooperation with industry. It encourages us to go forward in innovation," she added.

A double-sided screen developed by Meizu Technology was among the gold medal winners for industrial design.

The innovation especially meets the personalized needs of young people and has helped Meizu to generate more than 1 million smartphones installed with such screens so far, said Xie Zhi qiang, senior manager at the IP department of the company. .

"This is the first time for us to win such a great honor," he said.

In addition, another 695 inventions and 61 industrial designs were granted awards for excellence. Nearly 6,000 projects have received awards since the program was started in 1989.

liangkaiyan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/27/2018 page17)