Russia (bbabo.net), - IFI CLAIMS Patent Services conducted a study of the patent activity of the American innovation market.
IFI CLAIMS, the largest aggregator of US and global patent data, has published its annual 2021 U.S. Top 50 and IFI Global 250 dedicated to patent activity, in line with current trends in the innovation economy. The authors traditionally analyze the registration activity of global and American businesses, as well as individual foreign companies that have received US patents.
Ranking 2021 U.S. The Top 50 shows that U.S. national business as a whole is leading its technology market with 150,801 patents over the past year, up 69% from second-place Japanese entrepreneurs who received 47,105 titles of protection in the U.S. in 2021. In third place are representatives of South Korea - 21,264 patents, in fourth place - holders of American patents from China (20,679). Closes the top 5 business in Germany, the most energetic European player in the US innovation market (14,663).
The United States also leads in terms of the level of representation of national companies in the IFI Global 250: in 2021, 70 companies entered the rating. The second place is occupied by Japan - 51 companies, the third place - by China (46 companies). At the same time, six Chinese companies entered the top ten at once, while the US is represented only by IBM, which ranks eighth. This indicator indicates the growing patent dominance of China - almost every third patent from the portfolio of IFI Global 250 participants is located there.
Mike Baycroft, Head of IFI CLAIMS Patent Services, emphasized that well-formed industrial property is a key tool for monetizing any new development, therefore, the number of patents is an important indicator of market success: industries, the stakes are highest, what kind of technology sells best. In addition, the desire of businesses to register inventions usually indicates a favorable economic situation and developed legal institutions of states.”
At the same time, the most noticeable result of the year was a serious subsidence of the curve on the graph of patent activity. In 2021, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted a total of 327,329 applications. In the pandemic year of 2020, this figure was higher - 352,000. The decline was about 7%. According to Mike Baycroft, last year saw the sharpest decline in patents granted in a decade, with the last time such a massive failure was in 2012.
Patent activity has declined not only among US companies, but also among the vast majority of foreign applicants. The exception is China with a 10% growth - from 18,792 patents in 2020 to 20,679 in 2021. As a result, in 2021 U.S. Four Chinese companies made it into the Top 50: Huawei at number five, BOE at number 11, Advanced New Technologies at number 43, and Guangdong Oppo at number 49.
Against the backdrop of a global decline in inventive enthusiasm, the list of the most successful segments of the American technology market itself has changed little. Among research areas, biocomputing, an approach in the field of artificial intelligence that uses biological theories and principles, has risen to the first place in terms of the number of patents. It is worth noting that biocomputing has grown by 54% since 2017. Also among the leaders in the growth of agricultural technology, namely the improvement and creation of new varieties of plants such as soybeans, corn, tomatoes. Growth over five years was 42%. Also positive dynamics was shown by electronic devices for smoking - growth by 40%, machine learning - by 39%, quantum computers - by 36%. Growth was recorded in mining and water drilling technology, computer-aided design and other areas.
The top three companies in the 2021 U.S. rankings Top 50 also differs little from last year. It should be noted that it has remained unchanged over the past five years. IBM retained its first place in terms of the number of patents issued, even slowing down by 5% compared to last year (8682 vs. 9138). Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Canon follow with 6366 and 3021 patents issued respectively.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co TSMC Ltd ranked fourth in 2021 with 2,798 patents granted, up four positions from the previous year. Rounding out the top five is Huawei with 2,770 patents, which also moved up four positions.
Despite the fact that most of the rating participants had to moderate their patent activity in 2021, a number of companies managed to increase the number of patents granted to them.“Of the 2021 US Top 50, 13 companies increased their patent activity in the past year. The top five was led by Advanced New Technologies Co Ltd, which increased its patent portfolio by almost eight times. Followed by: Micron Technology, whose number of patents grew by 16.5%, Saudi Arabian Oil Co with patents up 28%, Guangdong Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp Ltd up 33% and EMC IP Holding Co LLC up 13.5%,” Baycroft said.
In terms of total corporate patent portfolios, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd topped the IFI Global 250 with a portfolio of 90,416 patents. The second place belongs to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (78,415), the third place belongs to Midea Group Co Ltd (58,495), and the fourth place belongs to Huawei Investment and Holding Co Ltd (48,307). The top five is closed by China Petrochemical Corp (45,362).
Comparing the data of the IFI CLAIMS Patent Services study on patents granted in the United States and the information of the US Patent and Trademark Office on the volume of patent applications filed, one can see that there is not a drop in creative activity, but a tightening of the office’s approach to examination, said the chairman of the RSPP Committee on Intellectual Property and Creative Industries Andrei Krichevsky.
The head of the profile committee of the RSPP said that a sharp decrease in the number of patents issued in the United States in 2021 (7%) with a slight decrease in the number of applications (0.4%) suggests a trend towards "strengthening" national patents due to more thorough patent examination. It should also be taken into account that the average processing time for patent applications in the United States is about 23 months. This means that in 2021, in the US, for the most part, applications submitted back in 2019 were approved - this was the year the largest number of applications was submitted in the last five years.
“Starting from 2019, we can see a similar trend in the activities of the Russian patent office, when the number of refusals to grant patents doubled compared to the previous period. In 2020, the number of refusals by Rospatent increased by another 20%, despite no volume of applications was observed, although, of course, the total percentage of refusals in Russia is still less than 20% and still lags far behind the American one, which is approaching 50%," Andrei Krichevsky noted.
In his opinion, such a policy of patent offices correlates with a trend towards increased control of corporations over technologies. The level of monopolization in the technology business continues to grow: for example, Huawei, Samsung, LG are leading by a wide margin in wireless network protocols, IBM and Google have created a large reserve in the field of quantum computing, IBM and Microsoft in machine learning technologies. In many respects, the growth of patent portfolios of large corporations is provided not so much by their own developments, but by transactions to acquire technological start-ups along with their patents.
“In this case, the beneficiaries of the policy of tightening patent examination are both the owners of large patent portfolios and the state itself. For corporations, the rigor and high level of patent examination primarily means the quality of the assets they acquire. At the same time, for the state, it is also a matter of protecting the domestic market, after all, the emergence of weak, junk patents primarily harms conscientious national manufacturers, who are forced to develop under conditions of serious restrictions or even become victims of patent trolls,” Andrei Krichevsky believes.
In a series of optimistic forecasts, the 2021 ratings showed that the diversity of industries presented as the most active in patenting inspires hope that both purely innovative and traditional industries will increase intangible assets in the near future.
IFI CLAIMS Patent Services is the largest and most comprehensive database of interconnected patent data on which many applications, web services and solutions such as Google Patents are built.
More than 145 million IFI CLAIMS patent records are available to multiple data centers and data lakes of companies, banks, patent offices and universities around the world.
Every year in January, IFI CLAIMS releases patent ratings based on the results of the previous year (Fast Growing Technologies; US Top 50; Global S&P 100; Global 250), which are used by the world's leading corporations.
In 2021, IFI CLAIMS for the first time supplemented the traditional rankings with new in-depth case studies on individual industries and companies in the context of their patent activity.
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