e-Mobility Technology – Who Owns the Strongest Patent Portfolio?

In the past weeks, we have learned who the main players (top 20 patent owners) are, in terms of portfolio size, among firms developing e-mobility technologies. We further ranked this group of innovators based on the size of their portfolios, number of active patents in their portfolio and also according to the legal status of active patents owned. What we haven’t looked at so far, is a comparison of these companies on the basis of the quality of their portfolios, i.e. who owns the strongest patent portfolio? 

Therefore, in this edition of #emobility updates, we used LexisNexis® PatentSight® to rank the firms that are developing e-mobility technologies, based on portfolio strength as measured by their portfolio’s Patent Asset Index.

What is the Patent Asset Index? 

Patent Asset Index, our proprietary and patented patent quality metric, is used to evaluate overall patent portfolio strength or quality. A portfolio’s Patent Asset Index is calculated by using two other proprietary metrics Technology Relevance and Market Coverage – each respectively measuring the quality of the technology protected by the patent and the overall size of the global markets protected by the patent. These two indicators are combined to arrive at a measure we named Competitive Impact of a patent which measures the average quality of the patent. Patent Asset Index is simply a summation of the Competitive Impact of all the patents in a portfolio and indicates the overall strongest patent portfolio in comparison to other portfolios.

e-Mobility developers ranked according to Patent Asset Index 

On the chart ranking companies based on their portfolio Patent Asset Index, the top position is still held by Toyota Motor which maybe mostly explained by the large portfolio of patents that they own in this technology. Since the Patent Asset Index of a portfolio is the sum of all the competitive impact of patents within the portfolio, a considerably large portfolio can result in a correspondingly large Patent Asset Index.

Shifting focus from the top spot, almost every single company has had a change of position on the ranking chart as compared to their earlier portfolio size-based rankings. For example Ford was ranked at 6^th according to the traditional metric and jumped to 2^nd place, when the quality of its patents is considered.

Similarly, some companies like WiTricity and BYD Company did not even register a presence on the Top 20 list of patent owners, when ranked according to portfolio size. They appear only in the overall portfolio strength ranking, in which WiTricity is ranked at 11 and BYD Company at 16. For a company developing technologies and products in this space, a simple look at all the players and their portfolio size would be wildly insufficient. Since such a narrow view of the technology field, would leave them vulnerable to other strong players in the field like WiTricity & BYD. Within the PatentSight software, if you click on the name of a company, you can perform a deep dive into the portfolios of these companies directly from this chart. Here you can instantly review the patents that they own in this technology.

Other major uses of the Patent Asset Index

Apart from benchmarking your competition, the Patent Asset Index is also helpful when identifying new players in a technology, who may own relatively smaller portfolios which have high Patent Asset Index values. These could, for example, be your new acquisition targets. Being an established player in any market, your firm could benefit from such insights as the kind of technologies contained within the strongest patent portfolio owned by smaller startup type companies. If the technology behind these patents can bridge the gap between your current R&D and the technology required for a competitive market offering, then this set of patents would definitely add value to your existing portfolio. Take your company from the sidelines to the center of the game, using a host of such similar analyses, which were specifically designed to empower you with actionable intelligence.  

Access all of the articles in our e-mobility series:

• e-Mobility – Watch Out Traditional OEM’s!
• e-Mobility – Why is Knowing the Legal Status of Patents Important?
• e-Mobility Technology – Who’s Making It vs. Who’s Buying It?
• e-Mobility Technology – How to Predict the Portfolio of Your Competition
• e-Mobility Technology – a Final Look at the Top Patent Owners

Learn more about PatentSight and the Patent Asset Index.

About the author: Dr. Sarbani Chattopadhyay

As a consultant, Sarbani assists clients in using PatentSight in the most optimal way, so that they get insights about patents, about their own portfolio, and portfolios of their competitors, and technologies they are working with, as well as which other technologies are being influenced by their inventions.