Microsoft Tops Australian Patent Grants for 2010

‘Tis the season for statistics, as everybody looks back on the year that was 2010!

As we previously briefly reported, patent research company IFI CLAIMS Patent Services recently released its annual list of top US patent recipients for 2010.  Notably, companies in the information and communications technologies (ITC) sector dominated the list, which was headed by IBM with an astonishing, and record-breaking, 5896 US patents issued in 2010. IBM has now topped the US patent charts for 18 consecutive years.

This got us to wondering – how would the corresponding statistics for Australian patent grants compare?

TOP PATENTEES IN AUSTRALIA, 2010

We arranged for some research to be conducted, and the results for the top 10 patent recipients are set out in the table below, side-by-side with their US equivalents from IFI CLAIMS’ data.  Our congratulations to Microsoft, for heading the Australian list, while also holding down a respectable third spot in the US!

	United States of America		Australia
Rank	Company	Patents	Company	Patents
1	IBM	5896	Microsoft	282
2	Samsung	4551	LG Electronics	245
3	Microsoft	3094	Daikin	138
4	Canon	2552	Qualcomm	136
5	Panasonic	2482	Novartis	114
6	Toshiba	2246	Shell	88
7	Sony	2150	IGT Reno NEV	83
8	Intel	1653	BASF	82
9	LG Electronics	1490	Aristocrat	79
10	Hewlett-Packard	1460	Silverbrook Research	69

PROFILE OF TOP AUSTRALIAN AND US PATENTEES

The data shows minimal overlap between the top patent recipients in the United States and Australia.  Only two of the US top ten – Microsoft and LG Electronics – make it into the corresponding Australian list, and only two further members of the Australian top 10 – Qualcomm and Silverbrook Research – even make the US top 50.  Silverbrook, incidentally, is the sole Australian company to appear in both lists (at no. 34 in the US, and no. 10 in Australia), and also the only Australian company in the US top 50.

The US top 10 is comprised entirely of information and communications technology (ICT) companies based in the US, South Korea and Japan. The Australian top 10 is a more eclectic mix of ICT (Microsoft, LG, Silverbrook and Qualcomm), pharmaceutical/healthcare (Novartis), petrochemical/energy (Shell), chemical (BASF), engineering/chemical (Daikin), and gaming (IGT and Aristocrat). Every member of the US top 10 is a household name, whereas many people would be less familiar with companies on the Australian list, such as Qualcomm, Novartis, IGT, Aristocrat and Silverbrook.

While IBM derives substantial income from licensing of its patent portfolio, this remains a relatively small part of the company’s total annual revenue, and does not appear to be based on a global patenting strategy.  IBM was awarded a grand total of only 20 Australian patents in 2010.

WIPO APPLICATIONS DATA AND FUTURE PREDICTIONS

US, Japanese and Korean companies dominated patent grants in Australia and the United States in 2010.  However, the recently released 2010 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) filing data from WIPO may provide an indication of things to come, since current international application filings are likely to be generally predictive of national patent grants over the coming years.  The top 15 countries, in respect of international applications filed in 2010, are listed in the table below.

Rank	Country	2010 Estimate	Percent of Total	2010 Growth
1	United States of America	44855	27.5%	-1.7%
2	Japan	32156	19.7%	7.9%
3	Germany	17171	10.5%	2.2%
4	China	12337	7.6%	56.2%
5	Republic of Korea	9686	5.9%	20.5%
6	France	7193	4.4%	-0.6%
7	United Kingdom	4857	3.0%	-3.7%
8	Netherlands	4097	2.5%	-8.2%
9	Switzerland	3611	2.2%	-1.6%
10	Sweden	3152	1.9%	-11.6%
11	Canada	2707	1.7%	7.1%
12	Italy	2632	1.6%	-0.8%
13	Finland	2076	1.3%	-2.2%
14	Australia	1736	1.1%	-0.2%
15	Spain	1725	1.1%	10.3%

While the current leaders in patent grants remain in the top five filers of international applications, only four countries in the top 15 have demonstrated any growth in PCT filings in 2010 compared with 2009.  Of these, the growth from Japan and Germany is modest compared with Korea (20.5%) and China (56.2%).  Indeed, two of the top four PCT applicants in 2010 were Chinese – ZTE Corporation at number two, with 1863 applications (more than the entire country of Australia), and Huawei Technologies at number four, with 1528 applications.

There are serious questions as to whether China’s filing performance reflects genuine innovation, or is more simply the result of government incentives (see, e.g., article ‘Patents, yes; ideas, maybe’ at The Economist).  We imagine that there are elements of both, but in time it seems inevitable that China, and Chinese companies, will dominate the global patent system.

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Acknowledgement: our thanks to the Information Services team at Watermark – Intellectual Asset Management for providing Australian patent grant data.

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Before You Go…

Thank you for reading this article to the end – I hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful.  Almost every article I post here takes a few hours of my time to research and write, and I have never felt the need to ask for anything in return.

But now – for the first, and perhaps only, time – I am asking for a favour.  If you are a patent attorney, examiner, or other professional who is experienced in reading and interpreting patent claims, I could really use your help with my PhD research.  My project involves applying artificial intelligence to analyse patent claim scope systematically, with the goal of better understanding how different legal and regulatory choices influence the boundaries of patent protection.  But I need data to train my models, and that is where you can potentially assist me.  If every qualified person who reads this request could spare just a couple of hours over the next few weeks, I could gather all the data I need.

The task itself is straightforward and web-based – I am asking participants to compare pairs of patent claims and evaluate their relative scope, using an online application that I have designed and implemented over the past few months.  No special knowledge is required beyond the ability to read and understand patent claims in technical fields with which you are familiar.  You might even find it to be fun!

There is more information on the project website, at claimscopeproject.net.  In particular, you can read:

1. a detailed description of the study, its goals and benefits; and
2. instructions for the use of the online claim comparison application.

Thank you for considering this request!

Mark Summerfield

Tags: Australia, China, News, PCT, Statistics, US