New Developments in Patent Applications in Mexico

In October 2024, the newly appointed Director General of IMPI initiated a new practice at the Mexican Intellectual Property Office. With regard to the 65,000 backlogs of patent applications currently accumulated by IMPI, the new IMPI management will prioritize accelerating the examination process and shortening the time to patent authorization.

According to public data provided by IMPI, in the past five years from 2018 to 2022, the annual authorization volume of IMPI increased by about 17%. The total number of patent applications authorized in 2018 was 8,921, which increased to 10,471 in 2023.

According to the Federal Law on the Protection of Industrial Property, which came into effect in November 2020, the patent applications currently submitted to IMPI have not yet reached the maximum period of 5 years. In the next 12 months, pending patent applications will not meet IMPI's requirements for adjusting the patent application period. This provides the new management with a very short window period to significantly improve the patent approval time.

At the same time, this also provides an important opportunity for patent owners to add extension requests for the issuance of supplemental certificates for applications filed before November 2020.

[* Supplementary Certificate of Mexican Patent : It means that IMPI is now considering issuing supplementary certificates to compensate patent owners for unreasonable delays in patent examination during the patent authorization process. According to Article 126 of the Mexican Industrial Property Law, if there is a delay in the patent examination process that is directly attributed to IMPI without justifiable reasons, resulting in the examination time exceeding five years, the patent owner can apply for a supplementary certificate to adjust the patent term. At the same time, the extension of the patent term is also mentioned in some other international treaties in which Mexico participates, such as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). ]