The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office received a record 417,922 patent applications in 2022. This is a 2% increase over filings in 2021. However, patent grants dropped 1% to 323,015 for 2022. This is the third year in a row that issued patents has declined. Pending applications has increased 30% in the past five years, to over 700,000.
Approximately 56% of issued U.S. patents are granted to foreign companies. Leading the way is Samsung, which received 6248 U.S. patents in 2022. IBM was second in issued U.S. patents, at 4398 (down almost 50% from 2021 patents).
Other top 10 U.S. patentees include: Taiwan Semiconductor, Huawei Technologies, Canon, LG Electronics, Qualcomm, Intel, Apple and Toyota. Globally, the top 10 patent companies for 2022 are: Panasonic Holdings Corp; Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Hitachi Ltd.; Chinese Academy of Sciences CAS, Canon Inc., Toshiba Corp., Midea Group Co. Ltd., Toyota Motor Corp., Mitsubishi Electric Corp, and China State Construction Engineering Corp.
On a country-by-country basis, U.S. companies received the most patents, followed by companies based in Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, Taiwan, France, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Canada. Clearly, Asian companies see value in U.S. patents. While U.S. filings (140,000+ applications) were nearly 7 times more than China (approximately 25,000), China applicants had the highest growth rate of any country, compared to 2021 application filings.
According to research firm IF Claims Patent Services, the top 10 technologies for U.S. patent filings include:
- Autonomous vehicles;
- Electrical digital data processing;
- Earth drilling for oil, gas and water;
- Computer arrangements based on biological models
- Electrical Smoking devices;
- Quantum computers;
- Cigarettes;
- 3D culture;
- Machine Learning; and
- Breathing masks.
