In my previous two articles I looked at entries to the Australian patent system in 2019, i.e.
who filed new applications last year, and
which patent attorney firms were the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the filing stakes. These numbers tell us something about the current state of the market, and which companies are innovating – and seeking to protect their innovations – right now. Many people, however, are more interested in who has been obtaining granted patent rights, rather than who
might obtain granted rights in a few years’ time. Indeed, the unveiling of
the top recipients of US patents by IFI Claims Patent Services has become something of an annual event,
generating considerable media interest, and the now-familiar sight of IBM sitting at the top of the list (for 27 consecutive years).
According to IFI Claims,
there were 333,530 new US patents issued in 2019. Patently-O’s Dennis Crouch, on the other hand,
puts the number at 354,507, while a search on
the USPTO’s own database (using the query string ‘
ISD/20190101->20191231 and APT/1’) returns a count of 354,446. Who to believe?! Whichever number is correct, 2019 established a new all-time high, at about 10% above the previous record set in 2017.
I do not expect there to be quite as much interest in the fact that
17,007 Australian standard patents were granted in 2019. This was not a new record. In fact, it was slightly lower than 2018,
when 17,065 standard patents were granted, and well below the 2016 peak of 23,774. It should be kept in mind, however, that a surge in patent grants between 2014 and 2017 was driven largely by the behaviour of applicants bringing forward requests for examination prior to
commencement of the Raising the Bar reforms on 15 April 2013, so the past couple of years should represent a more normal rate of patent issuance based on the underlying filings and examination requests.
Samsung topped the list of patent recipients in Australia with 203 patents, followed by Covidien (150), Apple (137), LG Electronics (132), and Huawei (119). Not one Australian patentee appeared in the top 50, although New Zealand’s Fisher & Paykel Healthcare just squeezed in at number 48, albeit with just 35 patents. By way of comparison, in 2019 Samsung obtained 6,469 US patents (ranked 2
nd), Covidien 92 (68
th), Apple 2,490 (7
th), LG 2,805 (6
th), and Huawei 2,418 (10
th).
A notable absence from the top end of the rankings is Aristocrat which, despite filing a total of 722 standard patent applications between 2015 and 2018 received only 13 granted patents in 2019, in second place among Australian patentees behind national research organisation CSIRO with 25. In fact, the top 30 Australian patentees combined received only 162 patents in 2019, or 31 fewer than Samsung.
Overall, despite being consistently the second largest filing group (after US residents) Australians were only the fifth most numerous recipients of Australian patents in 2019, with just 908 patents, behind Germans (937), Chinese (1,035), Japanese (1,257), and US residents (8,139). So it seems that Australians are shunning our own patent system, which might not be such bad news if there were any sign that Australian applicants were securing patent protection in major export markets. This does not, however, appear to be the case. IFI Claims lists only the top nine countries in
its public summary of US patent trends, from which Australia is absent, placing the country somewhere behind ninth-placed Canada, which received 4,651 US patents in 2019.
