After crunching the patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office last year to identify patent trends for 2015, IFI Claims Patent Services ranked Apple as the 11th-top patent assignee with 1,938 US patents awarded last year (via AppleInsider).
That’s slightly lower than the 2,003 patents awarded a year prior, but Apple managed to keep its position (No. 11) from last year. The top 50 US patent assignees are once again topped by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) with 7,355 patents.
In the second spot, we find Samsung Electronics with 5,072 patents won in calendar 2015.
As for Apple, it was just 18 patents short of Microsoft, which this year took the 10th spot with 1,956 patents. By the way, in IFI Claims’ 2014 Patent Trends report, Microsoft was among the top 10 with 2,829 patents.
The top 50 patent assignees were awarded a combined 79,052 utility grants, accounting for 26% of the total patents awarded by the USPTO last year. IFI identified 42,864 unique assignees in 2015, with 11,109 appearing for the first time.
