IBM's US patent count fell 44% YoY in 2022 to 4,743, behind Samsung's 8,513, losing its top spot after decades as the company refocuses on its core businesses
International Business Machines Corp. dropped from the top spot for US patents in 2022, the first time in decades Big Blue …
Context & Ripple Effects
For a quarter-century, IBM treated the USPTO leaderboard as a trophy case: its 24th straight year atop the list came with a then-record 8,088 grants in 2016, and it was still first as recently as 2020, when it filed 9,130 patents against Samsung's 6,415. The 2022 collapse to 4,743 — behind Samsung's 8,513 — is not presented as a stumble but as policy.
The companion coverage makes the intent explicit: research chief Darío Gil says IBM will stop pursuing numeric patent leadership in favor of open innovation and collaboration, framing the drop as part of a broader refocus on core businesses rather than a loss of inventive capacity.
First-order effects
- Samsung inherits the top US patent ranking for 2022 with 8,513 grants, ending an IBM streak that dated back at least to 2015's 23rd consecutive year at number one.
- IBM's annual grant volume falls by more than half from its 2020 peak of 9,130, shrinking the defensive and licensing footprint built around that portfolio.
Second-order effects
- Rivals like Samsung, Canon, and TSMC — all ahead of IBM in the 2021 data — now anchor the rankings, making cross-license negotiations with Big Blue less asymmetric than during its dominance years.
- Gil's stated pivot to open innovation pressures other large filers to justify volume-based patent strategies, since the most storied filer has publicly disowned the metric.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual patent counts lose their standing as the default proxy for R&D strength, and league tables shift toward measures of commercialization and standards influence.
- The retreat fits the longer geographic drift in the corpus: US companies already received under half of the 327,329 US patents issued in 2021, so American firms ceding headline positions accelerates a shift already underway.
The trend: Corporate patent strategy is splitting between volume-based portfolio building, led by Asian hardware giants like Samsung, and selective open-innovation models championed by refocused US incumbents like IBM.