China and U.S. Rank Even in Wireless Communication Patent Applications Worldwide Through October 2020

According to a study released November 19, 2020 by Incopat, China and the U.S. are running even on worldwide wireless communication patent application publications from January to October 2020.  Specifically, in the field of H04W (wireless communication networks), which includes 5G, China and the U.S. both have 32% of the worldwide published patent applications. Japan comes in third with 15%. The top Chinese filer was Huawei with 8,607 published patent applications and the top U.S. filer was Qualcomm with 5,807 published patent applications.

The top 10 filers from January 2020 to October 2020 were:

Rank	Company	Country	Number
1	Huawei	China	8607
2	Qualcomm	U.S.	5807
3	OPPO	China	5353
4	Ericsson	Sweden	3997
5	Samsung	Korea	3471
6	LG	Korea	3104
7	NTT	Japan	1925
8	ZTE	China	1628
9	VIVO	China	1518
10	Nokia	Finland	1367

The top 100 companies on the list are mainly from 11 countries, organizations or regions, with the United States accounting for 32%, China accounting for 32%, followed by Japan accounting for 15%, South Korea accounting for 7%, and Germany and the Netherlands accounting for 4%. , France accounting for 2%, Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Canada each accounting for 1%.

Note though in most cases there is an 18-month delay in publication from priority date so the numbers above mostly represent applications filed in 2019.

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