China to promote intellectual property pledge financing

BEIJING — China will further promote intellectual property pledge financing, and relevant policies will be released soon, the country's National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA) said on July 9.

Intellectual property pledge is a financing activity in which enterprises pledge their intangible assets including trademarks, patents and copyrights in order to obtain funds.

Data show that more and more Chinese innovative micro and small enterprises get financing support through intellectual property pledge, which can ease their capital shortage and accelerate intellectual property rights (IPR) market transformation at the same time.

In the first half of 2019, the amount of newly pledged patents and trademarks financing nationwide reached 58.35 billion yuan ($8.48 billion), up 2.5 percent year-on-year, involving 3,086 cases, up 21.6 percent year-on-year, according to Hu Wenhui, spokesperson for the NIPA, at a press conference.

The NIPA will work with the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission and other financial departments to promote financial institutions to establish and improve the working mechanism of intellectual property pledge loans, and guide the banking industry to establish a credit approval system and interest rate pricing mechanism in line with the characteristics of IPR, so that more innovative micro and small enterprises will be supported, said Zhao Meisheng, an official with the NIPA.

Meanwhile, China will further promote the financing guarantee insurance of IPR to improve the risk sharing mechanism. Measures will be taken to strengthen bank-enterprise docking and pledge registration services, expanding the coverage of intellectual property pledge financing, Zhao added.