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Japanese companies which compete in the U.S. patents
[2009, May 20]
1. Introduction
According to the announcement of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the patents which published for a company in 2008 slightly rose from 157,284 cases of the last year in 157,774 cases. The first place IBM [U.S.A.], the second place Samsung [Korea], the third place Canon [Japan] and the order of top 3 do not change by the company distinction with last year.
The Japanese company is ranked the high rank a lot in an average year, the third place Canon, the sixth place Panasonic, the seventh place Toshiba, the eighth place Fujitsu, the ninth place Sony, the eleventh place Hitachi, Ltd., the thirteenth place Seiko Epson, the 15th place Fuji film, the 16th place Ricoh, the 20th place Honda Motor, in the US Patent acquisition number. Japanese companies are competing globally even in US Patent acquisition number.
I simply analyzed Canon’s patent by US Patent analysis tool (XLUS EagleG). The patent is “7313873： Mainly on Surface position measuring method, exposure apparatus, and device manufacturing method”. That was acquired at first in 2008 by Canon. I extracted 100 similar patents and made a figure of radar.
This field is an important field about the exposure devices such as a scanner or the semiconductor circuit exposure device (stepper) and includes the neighboring patents of the patent and understands what Canon controls tight. In addition, you can find Canon competes with Nikon (Japanese company) in global market.
In addition, except Nikon, Canon competes in the field where world’s greatest semiconductor exposure device maker ASML Netherlands B.V. approaches. In addition, ASML Netherlands B.V. is appealed for by an US Patent infringement about the semiconductor exposure device in 2001 by Nikon, and there is the thing that they paid money of reconciliation of 145,000,000 USD to Nikon in 2004.