PlainPatent

USPTO PatentsView · grant years 2015-2025 · May 15, 2026

Patent statistics from the live PatentsView extract

Key findings on grant concentration, foreign versus US corporate ownership, CPC assignment totals versus unique grants, and the 2025 partial year. Registry counts only, not legal or investment advice.

Compiled from official public sources by the editorial process.
50,000
Assignees in extract
3.42M
2015-25 grants
52.8%
Foreign-corp grants
12.1%
Held by the top 10

The census

50,000 assignees hold 3,420,560 US utility patents granted 2015-2025; Samsung Electronics Co. leads at 106,890 (3.1%), foreign corporations hold 52.8% of grants, and G06F leads CPC assignments at 7.1%.

Samsung Electronics Co.
#1 at 106,890 grants (3.1%)
52.8%
foreign-corp grants vs 46.6% US-corp
G06F
7.1% of CPC assignments, not of unique grants
2019
peak complete year; 2025 is partial

Key findings

Standalone, citable statements from this extract. Free to reuse with attribution to PlainPatent and USPTO PatentsView (CC BY 4.0 for this compilation; underlying USPTO records are US government works).

  • 50,000 assignees hold 3,420,560 granted utility patents (2015-2025). SUM(companies.patent_count) equals SUM(company_yearly.patent_count) at 3,420,560; the yearly table is the same grants sliced by year, not a second census. The extract is capped at 50,000 and starts at 5 grants; it is not the full USPTO assignee population.
  • 106,890 is Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.'s grant total (#1 of 50,000, 3.1% of the extract). International Business Machines Corporation is the US-corporation leader at 72,926 (#2 overall). These are historical USPTO grant records, not current R&D or product strategy.
  • 12.1% of grants (414,936 of 3,420,560) sit with the 10 largest assignees. The other 49,990 hold 87.9%. Concentration is real and bounded; do not read the top 10 as "most of US patenting."
  • 52.8% of grants (1,804,577) are held by foreign corporations (PatentsView type 3) from 24,795 assignees (49.6% of the extract). US corporations (type 2) hold 46.6% of grants from 25,008 assignees (50%). More US assignees, more foreign grants. Type codes classify the legal owner, not where the research happened.
  • G06F (electric digital data processing) is 580,551 of 8,201,866 CPC assignments (7.1%), #1 of 670 subclasses. Assignments are not unique grants: 8,201,866 labels on 3,420,560 grants is 2.4 labels per grant. International Business Machines Corporation leads G06F at 42,717 (7.4% of that subclass) while Samsung Electronics Co. leads overall volume.
  • 2019 is the peak complete year at 351,890 grants. 2025 shows 242,894 (69% of that peak) because the most recent year is partial: grants lag filing by 2-3 years. Do not read 2025 as a collapse.
  • 85.4 is Qualcomm Incorporated's Innovation Score (#1 on that ladder) with 30,354 grants (volume rank 7). Samsung Electronics Co. leads volume at 106,890 with score 81.4. The score ladder is not the grant-count ladder.
  • 24.7% of assignees (12,326 of 50,000) have 25 or more grants. The other 37,674 sit in the 5-24 band. The advertised company sitemap uses that 25-grant floor (plus proven GSC earners); do not treat all 50,000 rows as equally indexable.

Two cuts of the same extract

CPC subclass assignment counts (thousands). The gauge is foreign corporations' share of unique grants, not of CPC labels.

1. G06F581k2. H04L374k3. H04W237k4. H04N191k5. H01L165k6. A61B162k7. A61K151k8. G06Q145k
CPC subclass assignments, thousands (2015-2025)

Foreign corporations hold 52.8% of 3,420,560 grants (type 3); US corporations hold 46.6% (type 2)

0%100%52.8%
Foreign corporations hold 52.8% of 3,420,560 grants (type 3); US corporations hold 46.6% (type 2)

Download the CPC subclass CSV (670 rows, CC BY 4.0). Columns are assignment counts, not unique grants; the header states the 2.4 labels-per-grant ratio.

Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, PatentsView Granted utility patents, disambiguated assignees, CPC classifications · 2015-2025 Figures are PlainPatent's presentation of the published PatentsView extract, not an official USPTO release and not legal, investment, or R&D-strategy advice. Grant counts describe historical protection sought, not current research.

Every figure on PlainPatent is rendered directly from USPTO source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Key findings use companies.patent_count for unique grants and cpc_groups.patent_count for CPC assignments. The two denominators are labeled separately and are not mixed into one share. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of PatentsView 2015-2025.