Over eight million patents are held worldwide with a huge number of these patents related to the pharmaceuticals industry.

For instance, in the UK and US, pharmaceutical patent applications account for almost 10% of all annual applications.

All of these patent holders have to pay regular renewal fees, usually every year, to the Patent Office for each country to keep their patents in force.

For drug companies that hold global patents, managing IP can be both expensive and time-consuming.

The amount payable for a patent renewal is usually modest (£100 or so) – varying from country to country and with the age of the patent.

But patent holders are often being charged up to 4 times the actual cost to make these payments! This extra cost quickly mounts up when multiple patents are involved in many countries.

How does this happen? Initially patent agents (or the specialist renewals companies like CPA Global, Dennemeyer and Patrafee that they appoint) assume responsibility for making these payments – often without explaining what they are about.

Fees charged for everything in the patent world are high – in most cases justifiably because patent laws are complex. As a patent owner you get used to regular bills – and they are difficult to challenge because of this complexity.

But making renewal payments is essentially a straight forward and recurring  exercise and does not justify the charges currently being levied.

Why do most businesses put up with this situation? For two reasons, firstly because it is difficult to find out exactly how much is payable and secondly because they do not trust themselves to make this important payment on time each year.

So RenewalsDesk.com has come up with a simple solution.  It has collated all of the information about these renewal costs on a freely accessible website.

And if you wish, you can set up an auto-pay arrangement to ensure the payments are made every year until you decide to stop them.  The charges levied for this service are a fraction of the current costs and are clearly shown.

If you would like to setup a free patent renewal reminder just head to http://www.renewalsdesk.com/patent-renewal-reminder-tool/