Leading owners of smart city patents worldwide 2011-2020

As of November 2020, State Grid Corporation of China was the biggest owner of active smart city patent families. The company owned close to 7,200 patent families, which is over 4,000 patent families more than the next company. Samsung owned the second most active families and LG Electronics the third most. The growth of State Grid Corp's portfolio has far outpaced its competitors for most of the past decade. The statistic is based on data provided by PatentSight.

Largest smart city patent owners worldwide from 2011 to November 2020, by number of active patent families

Reporting Date	State Grid Corp	Samsung	LG Electronics	Denso	Chinese Academy of Sciences	Mitsubishi Electric	Toyota Motor	Panasonic	Huawei	Hitachi
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Release date

November 2020

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2011 to November 12, 2020

Supplementary notes

* A patent family is defined as a group of patent documents all of which have the same set of priorities. I.e., it is a group of patent documents that protect the same invention across authorities.

The owner of a patent includes all patents owned by a company and its subsidiaries (by at least 50%) based on comprehensive research on corporate structures, M&A, Spin-offs, company names changes, patent transactions. PatentSight also tracks former names of companies and subsidiaries, ongoing mergers and acquisitions, acquisitions of the past, reassignments, companies that have the same applicant, and transliterations by patent offices.

Technology field definition by Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property – ip-search: "The technology field Smart City covers patents describing various aspects of connected or interconnected elements in modern urban environment outside the pure personal domotic space (-> see smart home). These smart elements include roads, tunnels, parking lots, traffic control and vehicles as well as elevators, supermarket rooftops or street lights. The smartness of all these elements is the capability to communicate within a network to improve or initiate various capabilities of the collaborating elements. Most elements in this smart environment feature in addition to the communication skills a certain sensor or measuring element, which produces the signal it should communicate."

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