China’s Top Court Orders RMB 800,000 Payout To Biosimilar Patent Inventor In Landmark Profit-Sharing Ruling
China’s Supreme People’s Court has issued a significant final judgment clarifying how employers must calculate and pay remuneration to inventors of commercially exploited service inventions.
The Intellectual Property Tribunal handed down its ruling on June 24, 2026, in a case arising from a dispute over statutory inventor remuneration linked to an adalimumab biosimilar patent.
The court held that a company owes its inventor a share of operating profit whenever a patented invention generates profit in a given year, regardless of whether the product is profitable overall across its entire commercial life.
Applying that standard, the court ordered the defendant company to pay inventor Wang a lump sum of RMB 800,000, reversing a lower court decision that had dismissed his claims in their entirety.
Wang, a Canadian national, worked as Senior Director of Formulation Process Development at the defendant company from 2016 to 2021, during which time he was named one of six co-inventors on a key patent.
The patent covered a formulation for treating TNF-alpha related diseases, which was implemented in the company’s product Gele Li, a biosimilar adalimumab injection that launched in late 2019 or early 2020.
Wang sued for both a share of patent ownership and inventor remuneration, seeking payments calculated as a percentage of the product’s revenue or operating profit across multiple years.
The trial court dismissed all of Wang’s claims, finding that because the company’s financial reports showed net losses in most years, he could not prove Gele Li had generated sufficient profit to trigger remuneration obligations.
The Supreme People’s Court rejected that reasoning on appeal, ruling that placing the entire burden of profitability proof on the inventor, when financial data is held exclusively by the company, was inappropriate and legally incorrect.
The appellate court instead ordered the company to submit a direct statement of Gele Li’s revenue and profit figures, which were then corroborated against the company’s own audited financial reports.
The court found that Gele Li had generated operating profit in at least some years since its 2020 commercial launch, satisfying the statutory threshold for remuneration to become payable to Wang.
In calculating the final award, the court determined that the patent’s contribution to the product’s overall commercial value was limited to 20 percent, reasoning that the product’s core value derived from the underlying antibody rather than the formulation patent.
The court divided that 20 percent contribution equally among all six co-inventors, finding no evidence to differentiate their individual contributions to the patented invention.
It then applied the statutory minimum rate of five percent of operating profit over a five-year period running from 2020 through 2024, arriving at the RMB 800,000 lump-sum figure.
The court also specified that this single payment satisfies the company’s remuneration obligation for the patent going forward, meaning no further annual payments to Wang will be required.
Chinese patent law imposes inventor remuneration obligations that have no direct equivalent under United States law, where employee inventor rights are almost entirely governed by employment contracts rather than statute.
Under China’s Patent Law, employers who commercialise a service invention must pay the inventor no less than five percent of the operating profit attributable to the invention each year for three to five consecutive years following successful commercial implementation.
The ruling is expected to carry significant weight for multinational companies operating in China, as it reinforces that year-on-year product profitability, not lifetime commercial performance, determines when remuneration obligations are triggered.