Having invested heavily ($500 million) in the Michigan based e-mobility startup, Rivian, and announcing a partnership with Volkswagen to investigate possible collaboration in developing electric vehicles (EVs), Ford is shaping up to be a formidable player in the already fast-growing EV market. It was also reported recently that Lincoln, which is Ford’s luxury car brand, is already developing a new fully electric vehicle in partnership with Rivian set to be released some time in 2022. Ford is sending clear signals to the market that they are ready to tackle the changes that are coming to the automotive industry in the form of digitalization. With the increased adoption of digital technologies by the auto industry set to change the way we drive, Ford is rapidly innovating to come up with safer, cleaner and cheaper modes of transport.

In November 2019, EconSight - a Swiss based consulting and research company, conducted a study of the Top 100 Digital Innovators. This ranking was created using LexisNexis PatentSight to analyze patents owned by global companies that are leaders in innovation in the digital space. This study revealed that Ford’s consistent efforts in innovation have resulted in their ranking being improved five spots, within a year. They lead the rank hierarchy in autonomous driving, closely followed by the VW group, Toyota Motor and Bosch.

Following the lead of this study, in order to understand more about technology adoption in the automotive industry, we conducted further analyses - comparing Ford’s portfolio to that of Volkswagen, Alphabet and Apple, who are also active in the automotive space. To maintain consistency, the analysis was limited to patents owned by these companies that relate to a combination of classic and digitalization technologies to be used in automobiles.

Patent analytics and valuation – only relevant for large corporations with huge portfolios, sufficient resources, and plenty of time? No! Patent analytics are particularly beneficial for universities’ innovation or patent departments, small- to medium-sized firms, start-ups, and spinoffs.

In an international tender, the EU Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition selected LexisNexis^® PatentSight^® and its business intelligence analytics software as the patent data and patent analytics provider.

Last Friday AMS announced that it finally acquired more than 55% of Osram’s shares taking a crucial step in acquiring one of Germany’s most known companies. Osram Licht AG is a multinational lighting manufacturer headquartered in Munich offering innovative and sustainable lighting solutions. AMS AG designs and manufactures advanced sensor solutions. With the acquisition of Osram, AMS wants to create a world class photonics and sensors champion.

Beside these eager plans and AMS growing rapidly in the last years, there is skepticism that AMS, which is merely a third of the size of its takeover target, would not be able to manage a global company like Osram. The size difference between the merging companies is also visible looking at the patent portfolios, which we will be taking a closer look at, in this blogpost.

As reported by Reuters on 24^th October 2019, Tesla shares gained 17% last week, as the company managed to achieve their targeted profits for the quarter. Due to this gain, Tesla’s market capitalization crossed that of General Motors', a legacy manufacturer in the automotive industry. As explained in the report, this sudden increase in profits for Tesla were mainly due to the increased demand for the Tesla cars. This news clearly highlights the trend that the automotive customer’s affinity has shifted from the conventional combustion engine vehicles towards the more technologically advanced electric vehicles. Tesla being a pioneer in this segment has been hailed as the driving force behind this shift. On the heels of this news, we think it is of utmost importance that investors study the patent portfolios of these companies to understand where, how and by how much the two automotive technology developers differ from each other.

We performed the following analysis using our patented patent data analytics software, LexisNexis^® PatentSight^®. By selecting the portfolios of the two owners and using a variety of available charts and tables to draw insights from, we compared the portfolios of these innovation leaders to find answers to the questions we asked in the previous section. Read on to learn how Tesla was able to achieve this success based on the quality of the technology that they own.

Doubling portfolio size while maintaining quality

Alphabet Inc, headquartered in Mountain View, California, was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015, when it became the parent company of Google and several of its former subsidiaries. With sales of $117.9 billion and a profit of more than $16 billion, the tech giant currently ranks 17^th among the world's largest companies according to Forbes Global 2000. We investigate a status quo of the company’s patent landscape using our industry proven patent evaluation metric, the Patent Asset Index™ and our Business Intelligence Platform PatentSight.

In this final e-Mobility update, along with sharing some more findings about our analysis of the electric mobility industry, we also decided to show off some more of our software’s data visualization capabilities. The charts below depict the portfolio trends and strengths of the Top 20 players in e-Mobility from various qualitative and quantitative perspectives. For e.g. in the Quantity vs. Quality Chart you can see how the current portfolios of these top players match against each other. Whereas, on the Patent Asset Index™ trend chart we see how their portfolios have evolved, in terms of overall quality, over the past decades. We conclude this deep-dive into ‘e-Mobility’ with a bonus section which gives you a sneak peek into one of our award-winning software’s coolest features.

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. 

Therefore, in this edition of #eMobility updates, we rank the firms that are developing e-Mobility technologies, based on portfolio strength as measured by their portfolio’s Patent Asset Index™.

PatentSight is proud to announce that our patent analytics software is now a patent protected Intellectual Property. In August, 2019, the USPTO officially granted Nils Omland, our founder and CEO, with a patent for the PatentSight Business Intelligence software solution. Back in 2018, when LexisNexis^® acquired PatentSight, this patent was still undergoing review. The granting of this patent makes our SaaS offering, officially, one of its kind.

Having seen in all of our previous blog posts on e-Mobility that more information is always better than little information, let’s take a look at the Top 20 patent owners in e-Mobility based on the distribution of ‘In force’ and ‘Pending’ patents within their 'Active' portfolio in e-Mobility technologies. Our previous post in this series discussed how these players ranked, in terms of their ‘Active’ patent portfolio in this technology. This week, we emphasize the importance of accurate legal status information, by differentiating Active patents into ‘In force’ and ‘Pending’.