End of February 2019 Samsung revealed its long rumored smart phone with a foldable display, the first of its kind to have an official release date. A number of players have been rumored to be working on such devices, however Samsung’s combination of in-house smartphone and display technologies may have led to it being first to market.

A closer look at the innovation landscape and the qualitative strength of the patent portfolios in the field of foldable smartphone technology shows the enormous lead Samsung has and the areas in which Apple has to catch up.

In January of this year, U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and Celgene Corporation announced they had entered into a definitive merger agreement for BMS to acquire Celgene.

The stated aim of the merger is to create ‘a premier innovative biopharma company’ with a particular focus on building an expanded offering in the cancer and immunotherapy space. If completed, the transaction is expected to cost $74 billion in a cash and stock deal, whereby Celgene shareholders will receive 1.0 BMS share as well as $50 in cash for each share of Celgene.

Our analysis of the two firms’ respective patent portfolios provides insight into how this merger would affect the U.S. pharma market. For this analysis, we employed our Patent Asset Index^TM methodology, which scientifically assesses patent families against Key Performance Indicators of Technology Relevance^TM and Market Coverage^TM.

With the acquisition of Maxwell Technologies, Tesla expands its patent portfolio and includes technologies that may lead to a major advantage in the future technology of efficient batteries for electric cars. The company is a specialist in the field of energy storage. For Tesla this can mean a leap forward in the highly competitive field of battery technology for electric cars. A closer look at this acquisition scenario shows us in which technology areas Maxwell can significantly complement Tesla's patent portfolio.

As of today effective drugs for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases are missing. In fact, Pharma giant Pfizer recently announced that they’re ending their research in this field. Which from an innovation analytics point of view does not come as a complete surprise.

You may have seen our recent press release but I wanted to personally express my excitement over the recent acquisition by LexisNexis® IP. We anticipate that as a result of this acquisition, we will be able to make significant enhancements to our product.

With added content, financial resources, and a broader customer base we will significantly accelerate our development. In particular, the advent of powerful self-learning algorithms often described as “artificial intelligence” is a great opportunity to reach the next breakthrough in patent analytics. We are thrilled to leverage our competence in high quality data and reliable science-based algorithms to continue leading the field with advanced tools that offer unique and reliable business insights.

Rest assured, many things you value about PatentSight will not change. PatentSight will continue under the leadership of myself and my team in the same offices in Bonn, Germany. All PatentSight employees will be retained and your current points of contact will not change. Our much-praised Consulting & Support Team will continue to serve you directly. The name of the product will change slightly to LexisNexis PatentSight.

We look forward to our continued relationship. Please contact me, Björn Ulmer or your main contact in the business development team if you have any additional questions.

An analysis of the patent portfolios of Broadcom Ltd. (AVGO), Qualcomm Inc. 
(QCOM) and NXP Semiconductor (NXPI) by PatentSight GmbH, suggests that Qualcomm’s portfolio is rated highest among the three companies based on the Patent Asset Index (PAI). 

The PAI is a scientifically developed and industry proven methodology to measure the 
innovative strength of an enterprise or an entire technology field. It is calculated at the level of a patent portfolio as the sum of the competitive impact scores of the individual patent families contained in this portfolio. The competitive impact in turn is calculated based on the technology relevance (citation-based indicator) and market coverage (patent protection around the globe, calculated based on the potential economic value of each country) of a patent family. Depending on the question to be addressed the Patent Asset Index can be calculated for a company as a whole, or just for patents belonging to specific business areas or technology fields: it then shows the strength of the company in those particular domains only.