How to break through the patent bottleneck of foreign enterprises, has become an urgent problem for the domestic fluorine chemical enterprises.
Nowadays, air conditioning has become an essential part of our daily life and plays an important role on refrigeration industry. Foreign enterprises has started their researches to the refrigerant much earlier than those domestic enterprises.The patent applications in that field not only is dominant in number, but also it is the core technology of that field. In contrast, our domestic enterprises, although with a great number of patent applications, but most of them are on the old products, and seldom submit an application for a patent abroad, which makes most companies have production capacity, but difficult to export their products, and then only become a foundry factory for foreign enterprises . So how to break through the patent bottleneck of foreign enterprises, has become an urgent problem for the domestic fluorine chemical enterprises.
The refrigerant HFO - 1234yf produced by American enterprise has been applied to the market, which will not deplete the ozone layer with low GWP. From the long run of the research, it was possible to guide the fourth tide of refrigerants, and become the dominant one. In research and development of HFO - 1234yf, Honeywell, Dupont, Daikin, gram have mastered the core technology of this field, the patent application is more than a half of total global patent applications in this field. There are only 38 patent applications of Chinese companies in this area with a percentage of less than 5% of the global total filings.There is a great gap between the enterprises of the United States and Japan in the number of patent applications.
How to break through the patent bottleneck of foreign enterprises?
First of all, the domestic enterprises should realize the transformation and upgrading as soon as possible, focus on developing downstream products. At the present time, most of the fluorine chemical industries in our country focus on low-end products, while less research and development for high-class products.With a large number of enterprises flow into low-end product market, there is a serious decline of product profitability and it is harder for enterprise to run their business. Now let’s study fluorine chemical industries abroad together, they have their research focus on the high-class downstream products and technology-intensive products high proportion in all of its products, which enable them to reach a rapid development. Therefore, Chinese enterprises must accelerate the pace of transformation and upgrading of enterprises, increasing r&d investment on high-class downstream products, change the dominate status of low-class products as soon as possible,to realize the transformation and upgrading.
Secondly, domestic enterprises should strengthen the cooperation with colleges and universities, integrate the advantage resources and develop advanced technologies. At present, the patent applications from colleges and universities occupies a large part of total filings in fluorine chemical industries, and it became the main development force of the fluorine chemical industry in our country, but most of them are based on their own researches few enterprise cooperation and less research and development funds. And enterprise's technical level is relatively low, there is a research needs but no development strength. Therefore, colleges and enterprises can integrate both their advantages of resources, form a complementary advantage and promote the rapid development.
Thirdly, the domestic enterprises should formulate patent protection strategy, strengthen the foreign patent layout. The strategy is not only submitting an application for a patent for patent protection, consider what need to be protected by patent technology, and when to submit an application for a patent for. In view of this, domestic enterprises must set up a special department, patent protection strategy research. At the same time, along with our country enterprise began to mass production and sales of fluorine chemical products in other countries, must attach importance to foreign patent layout, resolutely implement the strategy of "patent first", to avoid patent infringement problems.
