The 5th Commissioner Meeting between China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) kicked off in Chongqing on November 29, where chiefs of the two offices Tian Lipu and Benoît Battistelli together signed a MOU on bilateral cooperation and answered questions raised by local enterprises concerning Sino-EU IP partnership.

The European Union has become the largest trade partner of Chongqing nowadays, with half of "Made-in-Chongqing" laptops being exported to Europe. In 2011 alone, as many as 16 European enterprises have come to invest in this city, generating a total business worth 510 million US dollars. It is believed that the bilateral trade relations will be further enhanced upon the completion of a Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe railway, which is a magnificent project regarded and longed for by local enterprises as a "Silk Road of Intellectual Property". The signing of this MOU is just in view of the significant increase of patent applications in regions along the railroad, said EPO president Benoît Battistelli. The MOU will take effect next year and will then help enterprises at home and abroad get more comprehensive access to their counterparts'business information.

Since June 29, 2007 when SIPO first stepped into strategic partnership with EPO, the two parties have gradually switched their cooperation from pure technical matters to strategic events and have routinely held an annual commissioner meeting in turns between China and Europe to review the past cooperation and discuss on plans of next year.

（Source:IPR in China）