The Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced the 2002 top 10 private sector patent recipients this week. Below are listed those ten organisations, who applied for the most patents for inventions during calendar year 2002. For your reference, we included their 2001 rankings in the table

Top 10 Private Sector Patent Recipients for the 2002 and 2001 Calendar Years
Preliminary Rank in 2002*	Preliminary Number Patents in 2002*	Organisation	Final Rank in 2001	Final Number of Patents in 2001	Preliminary Rank in 2001	Preliminary Number Patents in 2001
1	3288	International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)	1	3411	1	3411
2	1893	Canon Kabushiki Kaisha	3	1877	3	1877
3	1833	Micron Technology	4	1643	4	1643
4	1821	NEC Corporation	2	1953	2	1953
5	1602	Hitachi	8	1271	8	1271
6	1544	Matsushita Electrical Industrial	6	1440	6	1440
7	1434	Sony Corporation	7	1363	7	1363
8	1416	General Electric Company	13	1107	n/d	n/d
9	1385	Hewlett-Packard Company**	15	978	n/d	n/d
10	1373	Mitsbushi. Denki Kabushiki Kaisha	9	1184	9	1184

*The listed patent counts are preliminary counts. Final patent counts should be available in April 2003. Patent information reflects patent ownership at the time of patent grant and does not include ownership changes that occur after the patent grant. Where more than one assignee (owner) exists, patents are attributed to the first-named assignee.
**Calendar year counts for 2002 for Hewlett-Packard Company include 159 patents issued to Compaq Computer Corporation nand 165 patents issued to Compaq Information Technologies Group.

Although there are currently a lot of disputes on for and against patents (needless to remind you the story about Rambus and DRAM), the number of patents filed by the largest corporations in the USA definitely influence almost all the industries and also our life. For the tenth consecutive year, IBM received more patents than any other private sector organisation. The difference between IBM and the closest “rival” in the chart is so large that it does not seem that the company founded by Herman Hollerith will soon loose its leadership in the number of inventions. On the other hand, Samsung Electronics and Fujitsu Limited were forced out by General Electric Company and HP Company. The latter received 324 additional patents from Compaq, therefore, we can again applaud to HP current management board for establishing so strong company.

We will try to publish top 10 of inventors in different industries (such as microelectronics) later when more information is issued.