Japanese IP News
Now Japanese companies too are facing patent cliffs!
Pharmaceuticals Takeda, Esai and Astellas will be facing the onslaught of competing generics in a couple of year’s time. It is facing the patent cliffs as some of their major drugs will be nearing their protected life span. Drugs like Prograf from Astellas, Aricept from Esai and Actos from Takeda will face great competition in a couple of year’s time. It seems like the rate of development of new effective drugs is just not fast enough. Could nano technology come to the rescue then?
May 20, 2009
China, the world’s factory is by far the best place for foreign investment. But according to a report from China’s Ministry of Commerce, investment dropped drastically for the first five months of 2009. Investments from EU fell 29%, Japanese investments fell 24%, and US investments fell 13%.
There are two causes. One, the Chinese government has begun to restrict investments that are not strategic; no more investments just to build another toy. And two, foreigners are beginning to diversify to other regions that will not carry the ‘made in China’ stigma as well as the unpleasant reality of a higher cost of production in China.
A glaring trend is to be seen in Japanese direct investments. It is no more beating a road to China, but a road to South East Asia instead. There has also been a scaling up of the technology chain by Japanese companies, fearing more about a China that seems to be copying everything left and right at ease. There has been many cases of intellectual property thefts in China, many of them could not be prosecuted due to the many dispatarte and nefarous IP laws of China. Politically, Japan has been sensing that a resurgent and developed China will inevitably become a nation of contention, especially on issues of claims of undersea material wealth within those territories bordering their coastlines.
June 25th 2009
Green is in and East is better than West.
From the Tundra to the Equator, the signs are everywhere. Snowcaps are disappearing, ice sheets are breaking off like never before. And Mankind is left fighting with the terrorist, never seems to be able to tackle the problems of global warming. Or is it?
In reality, a lot has been achieved, especially in the eastern powers of the globe. Silently, without much fanfare, the economic powers of China, Japan and Korea has hammered together a blueprint to better harness those energies that arrives at their doorsteps for millions of years but yet untapped. Yes, it seems that the next decade will signal the arrival of feasible green energies and technologies. If we don’t see it in Washington as yet, we definitely can see it in Pejing, in Tokyo or Seoul. In the northern part of China, there are so many wind turbines being installed that they can call it ‘wind farm village’. They are even putting it up on the sea bed near their ocean fronts, forever changing the sea shore views that you and me are accustomed to! And in Japan, we have the giant car maker groaning about their first ever yearly profit dip, and yet optimistic that their hybrid ace ‘Prius’ model having garnered a record booking presale order that even the most optimistic among them had not dare to dream! As for Korea, nothing has taken of yet, but the government has agreed to plunk in $31 billion for anything green.
Comparatively, the United States is still bogged down by bureaucracy as far as green technology is concerned. As far as is known at this moment, only a mere 2 billion is proposed for newer lithium-ion based batteries, and that is suppose to support the new breed of vehicles that are supposed to come off the new American Automobile setup! Evidently, there is also not much new money for these projects, unless the economy gets resuscitated fast enough and the budget deficit substantially reduced below 1.3 trillion dollars. Comparatively, Europe seems to be better of because they have apportioned more than 50 billion dollars for green technologies. The US has only allotted 30 billion for such purposes, no thanks to not signing the Kyoto Protocol and thus depriving the enterprises to pioneer research and development in clean technologies. Whatever the level of green tech developments, all the major economic powers will be meeting each other on the table in Copenhagen in December 2009 to try to resolve the world’s hunger for fissile energy with newer sustainable technologies. By then, the picture will be clearer as to whether the East is greener than the West.
June 29, 2009
Toyota, the front runner in the field of advance fuel efficient hybrid engine run cars has amassed an amazingly large repertoire of patents, a total of 2000 to be precise and is ready to license it to others if the price is right. It was reported that Ford and Nissan has shown interest. Much of the new technologies have been incorporated in its Prius brand, which in spite of the present bad times, has chalked up a very formidable advance booking, even before it is put up for sale.
However, it is not plain sailing for Toyota as fellow countrymen, Honda, is competing closely with its Insight. Both are touting almost similar good gas mileages and not surprisingly, have quite similar patents as well. But will they go to war to sue each other for patents infringements? Most unlikely, unless the sales of these models nosedived or one model sells better than the other. Right now, their concentration is in the US market; where there is an urgent need to bring down the gas mileage to 35 mpg by 2016 as sanctioned by Congress. The US automakers are frantically racing to achieve the target and plugging in the Japanese parts could be the best solution.
July 9, 2009
Japan UK IP bridge
David Lammy, the UK's Minister for Intellectual Property and Deputy Commissioner Minami of the Japan Patent Office penned an agreement allowing patent filings from both countries to move in accelerated path. With the agreement, once an applicant has received a favorable decision from one office, they can request accelerated processing of corresponding patent applications filed in the other, which in theory will speed up the process of filing. Known as the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), the UK government is presently having such similar agreement with the USPTO and the Korean Intellectual Property Office. The PPH system is the result of the Gowers Review done in 2006, which among other things, concluded that the UK has a fundamentally strong IP system, but lacks in innovation.
March 21, 2010.