Transformation in progress
Recently, three interesting economic figures about China from 2013 were published, which indicate that the role of Chinese companies in international trade might profoundly change in the future.
In 2013, China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) registered and accepted 825,000 invention patent applications. As compared to 2012, that is a 26.3 percent increase.
Moreover, 845,000 publications for copyright protection were registered in China in 2013, up about 23 percent year-on-year, official statistics showed. This and several initiatives to reduce copyright infringements underline China’s attempts to transform from a low-cost production to an innovative country. More interesting data has been provided by the Commercial and Trade Services Department at the Ministry of Commerce. They reveal that service outsourcing is on the rise in China. International service outsourcing in 2013 generated 62.34 billion US dollars for Chinese contractors, up 42.2 percent year on the year. This will most likely be just the beginning of a growing tertiarization of jobs within China.
In the future making use of innovative capabilities and outsourcing of something as complex as services might be an increasingly attractive opportunity for Western companies.
