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European patents and patent applications - statistics 2009

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

The EPO last week published its statistics on patents applied for and granted in 2009. The top ten applicants in 2009 were:

Rank	Company	Count
1.	PHILIPS	2556
2.	SIEMENS	1708
3.	BASF	1699
4.	SAMSUNG	1337
5.	ROBERT BOSCH	1284
6.	LG CORP.	1221
7.	PANASONIC	1020
8.	QUALCOMM	969
9.	TOYOTA	926
10.	SONY	913

You can find the rest of the top 100 applicants here.

The following chart shows the country of residence for the patentee of patents granted in 2009:

The chart shows a clear decline in granted patents from all major applicant countries, namely Germany, Japan and the US (the chart colours of Germany and the UK are almost undistinguishable, but a look in the corresponding table shows that Germany is the top line. Sorry, UK readers). All together, applicants from Germany, the U.S. and Japan received 61% of the patents granted in 2009. South Korea is the only one of the major filing nations that seems to (almost) hold its number of applications. The full chart is here, corresponding table here.

There is also a table on patent applications by technical field and country of origin. Unfortunately, like the rest of the statistics, it's a PDF, which makes the analysis very hard. May I suggest publishing such data as a spreadsheet in the future, allowing further processing?

Update: This graph from the annual report compares number of applications to granted patents, which is quite interesting (clicking on it will lead to a larger version which actually allows you to read the text):

Full post as published by IPKat on May 31, 2010 (boomark / email).