July 2025

1. The revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law has been passed and will come into effect on October 15, 2025

On June 27, 2025, the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress passed the revision of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, which will come into force on October 15, 2025. This revision increases the number of legal provisions from 33 to 41, responding to the needs of digital economy development and strengthening the legal protection of enterprise intellectual property rights. The core points are as follows.

Interpretation of the highlights of the law revision

1. Improve the regulations on confusing behaviors of unfair competition

The new law has made two important revisions to Article 7：

1) Item 3, Paragraph 1 of Article 7 (newly added): adds "new media account names, application names or icons" as emerging assets within the scope of legal protection, and clarifies that unauthorized use of new media account names, application names or icons with certain influence by others constitutes acts of confusion.

2) Paragraph 2 of Article 7 (newly added): stipulates that "using someone else's registered trademark or unregistered well-known trademark as a business name without authorization, or setting someone else's product name, business name (including abbreviations, business names, etc.), registered trademark, unregistered well-known trademark, etc. as searching keywords, leading people to mistakenly believe that it is someone else's product or has a specific connection with someone else" are deemed as confusion behaviors stipulated in the preceding paragraph. This provision addresses the issue of traffic confusion caused by keyword usage in the e-commerce industry.

2. Improve regulations on unfair competition practices such as commercial bribery, false propaganda, and commercial defamation

1) Paragraph 2 of Article 8 (newly added): clarifies that "the organizations and individuals specified in the preceding paragraph shall not accept bribes", which improves the regulatory responsibility for the bribee, and provides legal basis for administrative law enforcement.

2) Paragraph 1 of Article 9 (newly added): adds "other operators" as victims of false propaganda behavior, no longer limited to consumers, which expands the scope of protection.

3) Paragraph 2 of Article 9 (newly added): adds "false evaluation" as a form of false propaganda, and clarifies its illegal nature in response to current behaviors such as "click farming" and "comment control".

4) Article 12 (amended): adds "instructing others" to fabricate and disseminate false or misleading information in the scope of regulation, enhancing the crackdown on commercial defamations.

3. Improve the regulations on unfair competition on the internet

The new law provides important supplements to Articles 13 and 14, which is a major highlight of the newly revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law

1) Paragraph 2 of Article 13 (revised): clarifies that technical means include "data and algorithms, technology", and adds regulations prohibiting operators from using platform rules to harm the legitimate business activities of other operators.

2) Paragraph 3 of Article 13 (newly added): stipulates that "operators shall not obtain or use data lawfully held by other operators through fraudulent, coercive, evasive, or destructive means such as technical management measures". This article enhances the protection of data rights and interests to regulate data collection and use behavior.

3) Paragraph 4 of Article 13 (newly added): explicitly prohibits operators to abuse platform rules, organize or instruct others to carry out false transactions, false evaluations, malicious returns, and other behaviors, which disrupt market order.

4) Article 14 (newly added): stipulates that "platform operators shall not force or indirectly force platform operators to sell goods at prices lower than cost in accordance with their pricing rules", aiming to curb the pressure of low price competition on merchants by platforms and maintain a fair competitive environment.

4. Add regulations to address overdue corporate accounts

Article 15 (newly added): stipulates that "large enterprises and other operators shall not abuse their advantageous positions in terms of funds, technology, trading channels, industry influence, etc., and require small and medium-sized enterprises to accept obviously unreasonable payment terms, methods, conditions, and breach of contract liabilities, and default on payments for goods, projects, services, etc. to small and medium-sized enterprises", and regulate issues such as " payment term bullying".

The implementation of the new Anti-Unfair Competition Law not only strengthens the regulation of unfair competition behavior, but also introduces institutional arrangements such as data protection and platform governance in the context of digitization and platformization, providing more comprehensive and specific legal support for enterprises, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. It is recommended that enterprises improve their internal compliance mechanisms in accordance with the provisions of the new law to prevent potential risks of unfair competition in their business operations.

2. Sanyou team’s excellent performance in the third "Intellectual Property Industry Vocational Skills Competition"

Recently, the third "Intellectual Property Industry Vocational Skills Competition", jointly organized by the Capital Intellectual Property Service Industry Association, the Patent Professional Committee of the China Intellectual Property Research Association, and the Beijing (Zhongguancun) International Intellectual Property Service Hall, and co organized by Sanyou, came to a successful conclusion.

Sanyou team composed of senior trademark attorneys won the 2nd prize in the Trademark Comprehensive Skills Competition.

Two Sanyou patent search teams both won the 3rd prize in the Patent Comprehensive Skills Competition.

3. The 2024 Statistical Monitoring Report on China's Patent Intensive Industries has been released

In 2023, the total added value of China's patent intensive industries reached RMB 16.8713 trillion, accounting for 13.04 of the country's GDP. From this data, it can be seen that the new equipment manufacturing industry has the largest scale, accounting for 28.9 of the added value. Coming next is the information and communication technology service industry, accounting for 23.3. Followed by the information and communication technology manufacturing industry, accounting for 19.0.

In 2023, the number of employees in patent intensive industries was 50.8121 million, marking an increase of 1.6456 million from 2022 and a growth of 0.16 . The labor productivity reached RMB 337,500 per person, marking an increase of RMB 24, 500 per capita compared to that of 2022.

The total profit of patent intensive industries reached RMB 3.61 trillion, with a revenue margin of 7.43. Among them, the pharmaceutical and medical industry had the highest operating revenue margin of 14.52. The sales revenue of new products has exceeded RMB 18 trillion, marking an increase of 6.30  compared to that of 2018.

From 2019 to 2023, the average annual number of invention patents granted in patent intensive industries was 396,200 (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). The density of invention patents reached 410 per 10000 people. Among the top 30 industries in terms of scale, the engineering and technology research and experimental development industry ranks first, with a total of 111816 grants.