Taiwan Intellectual Property Office has published the rankings of applicants who filed the most patent applications in 2017. According to the lists of top 100 domestic and foreign patent applicants, most are enterprises or corporate applicants with increased patent filings of invention and utility model applications, while the patent filings from schools and research organizations were decreased. The number of patent filings based on the applicant categories and patent types are shown below.
| Year | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patent Types | Invention | Utility Model | Design | Invention | Utility Model | Design | Invention | Utility Model | Design |
| Research Institute | 825 | 40 | 3 | 861 | 44 | 5 | 782 | 41 | 8 |
| School | 1,389 | 1,141 | 53 | 1,054 | 1,107 | 47 | 1,004 | 807 | 42 |
| Enterprise | 5,299 | 893 | 475 | 4,955 | 943 | 505 | 6,134 | 1,145 | 388 |
Among the top 100 list of domestic patent applicants, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) filed 937 cases and ranked first, followed by Hon Hai Precision Industry Company at 485 cases and Industry Technology Research Institute at 451 cases. There were 27 local schools entering the list, and Far East University ranked first for 205 cases, but these were mainly utility model applications. Invention patent applications from school applicants were mostly filed by National Tsing Hua University with 96 cases, National Cheng Kung University with 90 cases and National Taiwan University with 84 cases. Also, there were 5 local research institutes entering the list. Industry Technology Research Institute led the ranking, despite the decrease of their total patent filings. National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology achieved an excellent performance at 135 cases. Metal Industries Research & Development Centre had 113 cases, Institute for Information Industry had 82 cases, and Atomic Energy Council had 50 cases.
For top 100 foreign patent applicants, Alibaba group ranked first with 762 cases, and Qualcomm ran second with 604 cases, and Applied Materials at third with 493 cases. Besides Alibaba, another top Chinese company is Oppo Mobile from Guang Dong, which ranked 7 for 323 cases. Patent filings from Alibaba and Oppo increased 6-fold and 11-fold, respectively. For top applicants from United States, patent filings by Applied Materials increased 48%. However, both Qualcomm and Intel decreased their patent filings in 2017. Notably, Intel’s ranking dropped to No. 4 for 429 cases in 2017 from No. 1 ranking in 2016 with 905 cases.
Regarding top applicants from Japan, companies with increased patent filings in 2017 include Tokyo Electron Limited (ranked 6th at 349 cases), Disco (ranked 14th at 208 cases), Screen (ranked 18th at 202 cases), Shimano (ranked 22th at 188 cases), Panasonic (ranked 23th at 186 cases), Nissan Chemical (ranked 24th at 180 cases), and Toray (ranked 25th at 177 cases). Some of the top Japanese companies had decreased patent filings in 2017, such as SEL (Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, ranked 5th at 352 cases), Nitto Denko (ranked 9th at 279 cases), Mitsubishi Electric (ranked 10th at 242 cases), Sumitomo Chemical (ranked 12th at 218 cases), Fujifilm (ranked 15th at 207 cases), Shin-Etsu Chemical (ranked 20th at 197 cases), etc. However, Japanese companies still accounted for approximately 40% of the top 100 foreign applicants that filed Taiwan patent applications in 2017.
