Four enterprises from Ningbo in Zhejiang province made it onto the recently released list of top 500 Chinese enterprises in terms of patents. They are Konfoong Materials International Co Ltd, Ningbo Fotile Kitchen Ware Co Ltd, Ningbo Qinyuan Group Co Ltd and AUX Group Co Ltd. 

The list comprehensively evaluates an enterprise's patent layout, application quality, and technology innovation based on nine assessment indexes, including quantity, approach, characteristics, and classification. It calculates, counts and analyses the patents of enterprises registered in China through a combined method of "artificial intelligence + big data". Each enterprise is then judged and scored on each criterion and gets a total score. 

Konfoong Materials International ranked 74th with 85.76 points. The high-tech company specializes in developing and manufacturing ultra-high purity metal materials and sputtering targets for the semiconductor and integrated circuit industries.

The annual R&D expenditure of the company is tens of millions of yuan. It has contributed to an innovative atmosphere where not only R&D personnel, but also field engineers and even workshop workers take an active role in inventing, according to Zheng Liding, director of the company's intellectual property department. To date, the company has applied for 637 patents, with 261 currently authorized.

Fotile Kitchen Ware ranked 385th with 77 points thanks to its heavy R&D investment. The amount is no less than five percent of the company's annual sales revenue. It has a strong R&D team with more than 780 experts including those specialized in the field of kitchen appliances. 

The company has set up a nationally recognized enterprise technology center, a laboratory recognized by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment, and a number of research institutes in Germany, Japan and other countries.

Fotile was among the first batch of national intellectual property rights (IPR) demonstration enterprises awarded by the State Intellectual Property Office in 2013. At present, the company has nearly 2,700 patents, including more than 400 invention patents.

Qinyuan Group and AUX Group were on 438th and 444th places of the list with 75.43 and 75.2 points respectively.