US Patents
The number of patent applications in U.S. from domestic IT companies is increasing. Samsung Electronics ranked second in the amount of patent registrations in the U.S. for 9 years in a row from 2006 to last year, and LG Electronics ranked 9th, beating Panasonic and entering the top 10 for the first time.
According to data from U.S. patent service company IFI Claims Patent Services on Jan. 13, Samsung ranked second by acquiring a total of 4,952 patents in the U.S. last year. The number increased by about 276 (5.9 percent) when compared to the previous year. For domestic companies, LG Electronics ranked ninth with a total of 2,122 patents registered last year. The number of LG’s patent registrations in the U.S. also increased by 177 (8.3 percent) compared to 2013.
Samsung’s performance is meaningful in that it outdid global patent giants like Microsoft and Google. Samsung Electronics invested 10.29 trillion won (US$9.52 billion) in R&D in 2011, 14.78 trillion won (US$13.67 billion) in 2013, and 11.4 trillion won (US$10.5 billion) by the third quarter of last year.
The company with the most patent registrations in the U.S. last year is IBM, with 7,534 items. IBM became the first company to exceed 7,000 registered patents annually by acquiring more than 20 patents a day on average last year. IBM has maintained first place in the number of patent registrations in the U.S. for 22 consecutive years.
IBM acquired more than 3,000 patents in 2014, which accounts for 40 percent of the total registered in the U.S. They came out from its strategic business fields such as cloud computing, big data analysis, mobile, social, and security. The number of patents applied by IBM in the fields has increased two times over the last five years.
Japanese companies Canon and Sony ranked third and fourth, respectively, following Samsung. Microsoft and Toshiba ranked 5th and 6th. LG Electronics ranked 9th, following Qualcomm and Google. Panasonic came in tenth.
Samsung Display (20th), SK Hynix (39th), and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (41st) ranked in the top 50 in U.S. patent registrations.