The Korean Samsung becomes for the first time the number 1 patent filing in the United States. If it dethrones IBM, which reigned for thirty years in this field, it is because the latter has completely changed its strategy.
Without doing anything new, Samsung has become number 1 in patent filings in the United States. Number 2 for years, the Korean has maintained its cruising speed with 8,513 patents filed. The real change comes from the former number 1, the “king” IBM. A name far from being misleading since it had been three decades that the American was enthroned at the top of the table. Before suddenly posting for this year 2022 a 44% drop in the number of patents filed.
Read also : IBM and Samsung have developed the transistors of the future (Dec. 2021)
Rather than a slowdown, this is a change in IBM’s strategy assumed in 2020 by its director of research, Dario Gil. “ We have decided to drop the pursuit of the largest number of patents, but we remain an intellectual property heavyweight and continue to have one of the largest portfolios (of patents),” he said at the time.
The field in which the drop in the number of patents filed by IBM is the most significant is a subject we talk about a lot in our columns: semiconductors. If the category remains important for the American – the 3e the most important since it accounts for 8.8% of its patents filed – IBM has however limited investments in this area over the past two years (it represented 13.4% of patents in 2020!). While reading the American top 20, the rest of the competition is investing heavily in this area.
Semiconductors in depth research
Samsung, IBM, LG, TSMC, Huawei, Qualcomm: you all know these companies and they are among the top 10 for 2022. And if we add Sony, Intel, Dell, Apple, Micron (not to mention Alphabet and others who also make chips), the top 20 patent filings relate more or less to semiconductors. Which is perfectly logical: the investment plans of tens of billions of dollars annually from Samsung, TSMC and other Intel feed an industry of factories, machines, products, software, etc. A competition that fuels a frantic race for miniaturization where every improvement counts.
If Samsung is number 1 in patents in the United States and a good part of these concern chips, it is TSMC which files the most patents on the “transistors of the future”, the GAAFETs. In Samsung’s own land, South Korea, the number of patents filed by the Taiwanese TSMC is booming and far exceeds the rest of the competition. What give him an advantage on the technical level. Or to allow it to sharpen other weapons than purely technological competition: those of law and licensing.
Earn money and/or lock the competition
In the arena of CPU and other chip titans, patents are powerful legal weapons. The first use of patents is obviously to protect the thousands of hours of work of engineers. The shield of intellectual property stimulates research which, in turn, stimulates technical progress.
In the context of tech, in addition to so-called “patent trolls” who attempt to vampirize the revenues of the giants, the patent system also takes the form of two other weapons. For the Chinese Huawei, deprived of the sale of smartphones, it is a question of earning money through a licensing system – and thus of enhancing its intellectual property.
Read also : 5G: Apple will not be able to control its 2023 iPhones as much as it wanted (June 2022)
But patents can also become real watchtowers responsible for slowing down or blocking competition. Apple would also bear the brunt of this trapped course in the development of its in-house modem. In a field dominated by Qualcomm, Huawei or Samsung, the slightest development involves checking what already exists and either circumventing or paying for licenses.
In addition to the brand image that sticks to the number of the patent holder, their filing is therefore both a protection and a foreclosure of competition. If IBM’s number 1 position was more neutral after its withdrawal from the world of consumer electronics, Samsung’s is less so. While the Korean is facing competition from Chinese manufacturers on all sides (smartphones, TVs, computers, etc.), the accumulation of patents could, like IBM and Huawei, allow it to toughen its tone.
SamMobile
