USPTO Open Data · Calendar Years 2020-2024A deeper reading
01
Five years. 318,000 patents.
Twenty companies.
318,000
Grants in 2024
388,000
Grants in 2020
-18%
5-year change
20
Assignees ranked
Total U.S. utility-patent grants · per yearColumn · zero-based · curated
388,000
374,000
327,000
312,000
318,000
20202021202220232024
The backdrop the twenty ranked companies sit inside: total grants fell from
388,000 in 2020 to 312,000 in 2023, then edged
back to 318,000 - a net decline of 18% over five years. Curated from
USPTO annual summary reports.
02
Trajectories
Top 20 assignees · 2020-2024 grants
slope graph · shared linear scale
Each line is one company's annual U.S. utility-patent grants over five years. The two endpoint columns - 2020 and 2024 - sit on the same vertical scale, so changes in slope are real changes in volume. IBM dropped from a three-decade #1 streak to sixth place; TSMC nearly doubled. The flat-looking lines in the middle are the steady payers - Samsung, Qualcomm, LG.
Trajectory · circles mark each year Notable mover (IBM, TSMC, Huawei, Hyundai)Endpoints label the highlighted movers and the largest steady filers; all 20 are named in Small Multiples below.On narrow screens the endpoint names are dropped here for legibility - read them in the Small Multiples grid.
03
Small Multiples
Each company's five-year arc, on its own scale
20 plots · y-axis local
The slope graph above shares one vertical scale, so the small lines flatten under the big ones. These twenty plots give every company its own y-axis - same x-axis (2020-2024), independently scaled - so the shape of each trajectory is visible. The five-year change at the top right is unscaled. Read across; patterns surface fast.
Coxcomb · wedge area ∝ section share (radius ∝ √share). The ranked list carries the exact figures.
05
Geography
Top metros · 2024 grants
dot plot · linear scale
Patent counts by inventor address (not assignee HQ). Each dot represents one metro; size is patent count, position is rank. Read horizontally for the absolute concentration in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, then read down for the long-tail metros where invention quietly accumulates - Minneapolis, Raleigh, Phoenix, Detroit. The Texas triangle is the underrated growth story.
01CASan Jose - Sunnyvale - Santa ClaraApple, Google, Nvidia, Intel18,4505.8%
02CASan Francisco - Oakland - HaywardSalesforce, Stripe, Lyft, Cruise9,8203.1%
Two assignees, the same numbers in parallel. The exact portfolio mix below compares their share across the eight CPC sections, with the difference in percentage points down the centerline; the trajectory overlay isolates their five-year divergence from the slope graph above. Want a different pair? The compare page lets you pick any two.
AKR
Samsung Electronics
6,377grants in 2024
+7.2%YoY
-1.4%5-year
Samsung ElectronicsIBMShared vertical scale · grants per year
BUS
IBM
2,782grants in 2024
-27.0%YoY
-69.5%5-year
Exact portfolio mix · share of each firm's grants by CPC section
This page reads U.S. utility-patent grants for 2020-2024. The primary source is the USPTO Open Data Portal (which absorbed PatentsView in March 2026); legacy PatentsView S3 bulk dumps remain live and are the canonical input for the bulk pipeline.
v1 status
The figures here are curated approximations from public USPTO summary reports - the bulk-data ingest pipeline is scaffolded but not yet run. Numbers are within a few percent of canonical totals; rankings and trajectories reflect widely-reported patterns. The wired-up version produces its own derived.json from g_patent.tsv, g_assignee_disambiguated.tsv, and the disambiguated inventor + location tables.
Trajectories (slope graph)
The slope graph shares one vertical scale across all 20 lines. Highlighted series (in red) are the four largest absolute or relative movers of the five-year window: IBM (-70% over five years, the dramatic story), TSMC (+67%), Huawei (+49%), and Hyundai Motor (+30%). The remaining sixteen are rendered in light grey for shape, not identification. To avoid a pile-up, endpoint names are shown only for the four movers plus the largest steady filers (Samsung, Qualcomm, LG); on narrow screens the names are dropped entirely. Every company is named in the small-multiples grid.
Small multiples
Each plot rescales to its own y-axis so trajectory shape reads regardless of magnitude. The five-year delta in the upper right is unscaled. Companies with a five-year decline beyond 5% are tinted red; rises beyond 5% are inked in black.
Sector composition (coxcomb)
Wedges are equal-angle, with wedge area proportional to the section's share of all 2024 grants (so radius scales with the square root of share - the honest Nightingale construction, where the eye reads area). The ranked list beside it carries the exact percentages and counts and is the primary read. Section codes are top-level CPC: H Electricity, G Physics, A Human Necessities, B Operations & Transport, C Chemistry, F Mechanical, E Constructions, D Textiles. A patent counts toward every section it's classified under; here we normalize to the dominant classification per patent.
Compare
On the home page the fixed Samsung × IBM pair leads with the parallel-bars table - reading toward the centerline you see Δ in percentage points, with positive numbers favoring assignee A, negative favoring B - above a trajectory overlay that isolates the same two series on a shared scale. The compare page generalizes this to any two of the top 20 assignees with a fully static CSS-only picker (no JavaScript): because an arbitrary pair is chosen in the browser, no pairwise Δ is computed there - instead the trajectory, 2024-share, and CPC-mix marks all use one shared scale in both panels, and the mix bars mirror outward from the centerline, so a mark's size is the comparison across the gutter.
What's missing from v1
Citation counts (which patents cite which) - the most-cited inventor list is more interesting than the most-prolific list, but citations require g_us_patent_citation.tsv, which is the largest bulk file. Pre-grant publication data, design / plant patents, and reissues are also out of scope here. The compare picker is live over the top 20 assignees today; when the bulk pipeline lands it gains a citation-impact dimension (and inventor / co-inventor networks) as a fourth axis alongside trajectory, share, and CPC mix.