Sector deep dive: Electronics
As mentioned previously, electronics is predominantly an Asian affair. The world’s largest patent holder, Samsung, sits atop our ranking, followed by its South Korean rival, LG.
Digitisation and connectivity are the engines here – effectively driving the ecosystem, which is further enhanced by AI and machine learning across various industries. Research is active in the areas of display technologies and haptics for smartphones, home appliances, infotainment devices, AR/VR, communication technologies and power management. This trend is here to stay as more and more devices become connected.
Table 1. Electronics players in the top 100
| Company name | EU grants | Industry | Country of origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung Electronics | 19,945 | Electronics | South Korea |
| LG Corp | 18,093 | Electronics | South Korea |
| Panasonic | 9,907 | Electronics | Japan |
| Sony Corporation | 9,773 | Electronics | Japan |
| Canon | 7,973 | Electronics | Japan |
| Hitachi | 6,381 | Electronics | Japan |
| Apple | 4,316 | Electronics | United States |
| Ricoh Company | 3,569 | Electronics | Japan |
| Seiko | 3,463 | Electronics | Japan |
| Toshiba | 3,435 | Electronics | Japan |
Table 2. Technology trends
| Top trends | Top players | Active grants | Top players 2019-2020 | Active grants 2019-2020 | Key areas | Other key players |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Display technologies/ haptics | Samsung | 1,140 | Samsung | 689 | Flexible or rollable LED/LCD displays, gesture tracing and control, tactile computer devices, electro luminescent panels, active matrix electrodes, OLEDS, display device circuitry, touch and gesture-based sensors, control and interface arrangements for touch screen, digitisers, polarisers, touch pads | Volkswagen, Huawei, Nokia, Alphabet |
| LG Corp | 996 | LG Corp | 504 | |||
| Apple | 765 | Apple | 293 | |||
| Microsoft | 533 | Microsoft | 293 | |||
| Sony | 495 | Sony | 260 | |||
Human-machine interactions-based devices | Samsung | 1,292 | Samsung | 563 | HMI devices, optical communication, voice controlled systems, biometric/voice security, HMI speech recognition, 3D-mixed reality, AR/VR, optical viewing arrangements for vehicles, optical HUD devices, gesture-based interaction, video processing, optical communication, image senor circuits for communication | Alphabet, Volkswagen, Huawei |
| LG Corp | 650 | LG Corp | 318 | |||
| Sony | 597 | Sony | 283 | |||
| Panasonic | 314 | Microsoft | 180 | |||
Wireless communication and networks | LG Corp | 2,572 | LG Corp | 949 | Structure or mounting of specific components, portable transmitters and receivers, wireless signal allocation devices, wireless transmission paths, wireless traffic scheduling, resource management, RF, ZigBee, wireless channel access, wireless communication access security, network data management, power management, mobility management, location sensing, wireless communication synchronisation arrangements | Qualcomm, Ericsson, Huawei |
| Samsung | 1,734 | Samsung | 840 | |||
| Apple | 1,226 | Apple | 507 | |||
| Sony | 852 | Sony | 401 | |||
Semiconductor devices for appliances | LG Corp | 1,140 | LG Corp | 471 | Active matrix displays for LEDs, LCDs, OLEDS, semiconductor components for circuitry, AMLCD driving circuits, optocouplers, colour-changing LEDs, semiconductor component arrangement | Robert Bosch, Siemens |
| Samsung | 922 | Samsung | 307 | |||
| BOE Technology | 181 | BOE Technology | 133 |