Top Patent Holders: IBM Tips the 4K Mark for 2008

While the PTO has eschewed publication of "top patent holders," independent patent research companies like IFI Patent Intelligence continue to track who is filing what in the PTO. In this year's "Top U.S.-Patent Recipients" list, IFI rounds out the top 20 this way:

    1 INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORP         4186
    2 SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO LTD KR                3515
    3 CANON K K JP                                 2114
    4 MICROSOFT CORP                               2030
    5 INTEL CORP                                   1776
    6 MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC INDUSTRIAL CO LTD JP     1745
    7 TOSHIBA CORP JP                              1609
    8 FUJITSU LTD JP                               1494
    9 SONY CORP JP                                 1485
   10 HEWLETT-PACKARD DEVELOPMENT CO L P           1424
   11 HITACHI LTD JP                               1313
   12 MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC                        1250
   13 SEIKO EPSON CORP JP                          1229
   14 GENERAL ELECTRIC CO                           912
   15 FUJIFILM CORP JP                              869
   16 RICOH CO LTD JP                               857
   17 INFINEON TECHNOLOGIES AG DE                   814
   18 LG ELECTRONICS INC KR                         805
   19 TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INC                         757
   20 HONDA MOTOR CO LTD JP                         747

To see the top-35 list, click here.

Two observations are made on the 2008 list. First, American companies captured only 49 percent of U.S. patents and hold only 4 of the top 10 slots, and 12 of the top 35 slots. Japanese companies hold 5 of the top 10 slots and 14 of the top 35. Taken collectively, the top 35 companies accounted for 26 percent of all the utility patents granted in 2008.

While American companies lead in total new patents for 2008, Japan is right behind with 23 percent; Germany is third with 6 percent, South Korea furth with 5 percent; and Taiwan fifth with 4 percent.

The second (and more glaringly obvious) observation is IBM's allowed patents - despite KSR and the PTO's "deny, deny, deny!" approach to applications over the last year, they nevertheless managed to break the 4K mark for issued patents. This mark is nearly triple that of HP, and exceeds the issuances of Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google -- combined. Also, IBM's issued patents for 2008 is a 133% increase over the previous year (3,147).

For more information, see:

"IFI Patent Intelligence Analysis of 2008's Top US Patent Recipients Suggests America May Be Losing Dominance" (link)

Asher Hawkins, "IBM's Brain Boom," Forbers (link)

Joff Wild, "IBM Looks For Patent Quality Solutions, But Could Big Blue Actually Be Part of the Problem?" IAM Blog (link). Joff's observation:

If pendency and quality are linked – and I don’t think that I am the only one to believe they probably are – you have to ask why patent office workloads and pendency times are going up. Is it, in fact, because companies such as IBM are submitting so many applications in the first place? Could it be that if Big Blue and many other large organisations were more rigorous about what to seek protection for and did not submit so many applications in the first place, the backlog would not be as large as it is, examiners would have more time to do their work and quality standards would not be coming under so much scrutiny?