In 2013, the USPTO issued 277,861 utility patents, a new record in terms of the numbers of patent grants, and an increase of 9.8 percent over 2012.*
Country of Assignment
Of the total, 126,574 (45.6 percent) were assigned to a US owner, a small increase in the percent held by US entities over 2012.
More than 19 percent of the USPTO utility patents granted in 2013 were assigned to an entity in Japan. The next largest foreign owner of patents was Korea, with 5.2 percent of total grants. Collectively, seven Asian countries were assigned 86,218 (31 percent) USPTO granted utility patents in 2013.
Germany ranked third globally among foreign assignments of utility patent rights, leading all European countries, followed by France. Collectively, the 28 EU member states plus non-EU countries Switzerland and Norway were assigned ownership of 40,001 utility patents in 2013, less than half of number of utility patents assigned to entities in the top 7 Asian countries.
The total number of USPTO utility patents assigned to China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) was 5,030 in 2013, behind Japan, Korea, Germany, Taiwan, and France, and ahead of everyone else. The rate of increase in patents assigned to China was 33 percent when compared to 2012 grants, and 145 percent higher when compared to 2010 grants. The 2010-2013 compound rate of growth of patents assigned to an entity in China was 34.8 percent, compared to 7.8 percent for everyone else.
USPTO utility patents Assigned to China owner
Year: Number of patents issued, Percentage change from previous year
2010: 2055
2011: 2484, 21%
2012: 3793, 53%
2013: 5030, 33%
Just 192 utility patents were assigned to entities in South America in 2013. Brazil was the top country (two thirds of the patents to assigned to UNASUR countries) followed by Chile, Argentina and Colombia.
More details on country of assignment are available here.
Class of invention, and US government rights in inventions
Below are some numbers reporting the percentage of 2013 utility patents that declare US government rights, by class of inventions. The government interest is either declared in the GOVT field, when a non-federal inventor discloses a government grant or contract associated with the invention, or when the US government is the assignee of the invention, such as cases where government employees are the inventors. Note that in many fields, such as nanotechnology, medicine, and robotics, the US government role is significant (13 to 31 percent of the classes listed in the table, for patents assigned to a US entity), while in other fields, such as photography or oil drilling, the US government role in funding the innovations is much smaller.
In the table below, patent classes are ranked by the percent of patents assigned to US entities that disclose US government funding in the invention.
Percent of Utility Patents in Class, assigned to US entities, and declaring US government interests
| USPTO patent class number (CCL) | Percent of utility patents in class assigned to US entity | Percent of utility patents in class assigned to US entities with US government interests declared (2013) | Patent class title (CCL) |
| 977 | 54% | 31% | Nanotechnology |
| 435 | 61% | 24% | Chemistry: molecular biology and microbiology |
| 436 | 57% | 23% | Chemistry: analytical and immunological testing |
| 424 | 54% | 18% | Drug, bio-affecting and body treating compositions |
| 423 | 42% | 18% | Chemistry of inorganic compounds |
| 514 | 52% | 17% | Drug, bio-affecting and body treating compositions |
| 901 | 40% | 13% | Robots |
| 438 | 35% | 6% | Semiconductor device manufacturing: process |
| 706 | 70% | 6% | Data processing: artificial intelligence |
| 320 | 38% | 3% | Electricity: battery or capacitor charging or discharging |
| 380 | 52% | 3% | Cryptography |
| 718 | 77% | 3% | Electrical computers and digital processing systems: virtual machine task or process management or task management/control |
| 704 | 59% | 2% | Data processing: speech signal processing, linguistics, language translation, and audio compression/decompression |
| 396 | 18% | 1% | Photography |
| 707 | 75% | 1% | Data processing: database and file management or data structures |
| 705 | 76% | 1% | Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or cost/price determination |
| 507 | 83% | 1% | Earth boring, well treating, and oil field chemistry |
| 725 | 62% | 0% | Interactive video distribution systems |
More detail on this is available here.
* All numbers based upon queries of the USPTO’s searchable database of patent grants, on January 3-4, 2013