Two Mainland Chinese Firms on the List of Top 50 US Patent Assignees
IFI CLAIMS Patent Services, a US-based patent data provider, recently announced the ranking of the top 50 assignees of patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2016.
In this year's ranking, IBM again held the first place with 8,088 patent grants, a slot which it has kept for 24 years in a row. In terms of country distribution among the top 50 patent assignees, both the US and Japan had 18 firms on the list; Korea had 5; each of German, mainland China and Taiwan had 2; and each of Sweden, Canada, and Finland had 1.
The two mainland Chinese firms included in the list were Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and BOE Technology Group Co. Ltd. For Huawei, it has stayed on the list for three consecutive years, and this year it occupied No. 25 position with 1,202 patent grants, whereas BOE, cited in Thomson Reuters' global innovation report as the second largest innovator in the global semiconductors field in 2015, made it to the list for the first time at No. 40 with 870 grants.
