Global Battery Patent Analysis Report

With the vigorous development of smart hardware products and a wide variety of products, smart phones require fast charging and large batteries have almost become standard, and PC tablets also need excellent endurance to meet the needs of mobility. Not to mention the dependence of VR, watches, bracelets and other wearable devices on batteries; For unmanned aerial vehicles, how much battery they carry is directly related to "how far you can fly"; The top priority of all categories is electric vehicles, the significance of battery performance to this topic can be distinguished between "are you joking" or "really going all over China".

Basically, this is a matter of supply chain. The more so, the more we can see the importance of technology accumulation in this field, especially the accumulation of patents will build a strong technical barrier. In this issue, we will recommend to you the analysis report made by the patent consulting agency Nanjing Huaxun on the patent reserves in the global battery field.

The battery technology concerned by Nanjing Huaxun mainly focuses on such aspects as the shape, size, charging capacity, charging compatibility and density of the battery. Among them, you will also find that the original battery industry's leading companies are Panasonic, Panasonic, NEC, Sony, LG, Toyota and Toshiba. Do you feel it? Our East Asian neighbors are holding the throat of energy in the intelligent industry. Of course, there have been some emerging entrants in recent years, including big ones like Google and Tesla, as well as start-ups like QuantumScape.

Let's take a look at the dry goods summarized by the intelligent internal reference.

· · · Patents Segmentation

Battery technology is classified from the perspective of patents, mainly including energy conversion, electrodes, circuit components, materials, processes, energy distribution, etc. (the last major item in the above table can be understood as other). As the king of today's battery industry, lithium batteries, whether batteries or embedded batteries, are the leaders in the patent reserve, with 4655 and 3808 patent applications respectively. The third place is manufacturing process technology, with 3614 patent applications in this area.

Generally speaking, the patent reserve of energy conversion is huge, and the number of patent applications in materials is also relatively large, while the circuit components are no longer the hot direction of patent applications, and the overall performance is relatively flat.

However, in addition to the number of patent applications, it is also necessary to examine the quality of patents under each category. The industry refers to its quality measurement parameter as patent strength.

In fact, there are several evaluation indexes for patent quality. In this paper, LexInnova cite the patent strength analysis methods published in the papers by Mark A. Lemley, Kimberly A. Moore, John R. Allison, and R. Derek Trunkey to reorganize the classification of high-strength patents in the following table.

Under the high-strength patent classification, we can see the efforts made by developers to find alternatives to lithium batteries. The number of high-strength patents applied for other types of batteries is even one more than that of lithium batteries, reaching 175, which is also the largest category of high-strength patent applications, but this number accounts for less than 5% of the total number of patent applications in this field. There are still few high-strength patents related to circuit components and electrodes, with only 3 subdivision directions at least.

LexInnova statistics from 2005 to 2015, the number of patents published in the field of battery changes year by year. The number of patent applications for battery technology is increasing year by year, especially after 2010, which is mainly driven by the progress of battery technology research and development in Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan and China. (Note that this patent volume trend does not include a forecast for 2016.)

· · · The patent PK of the giants

Let's take a look at the global patent reserves of companies and institutions involved in batteries?

The above figure shows the companies or institutions with Top15 patent reserves, namely: Panasonic, Toyota, LG, Hitachi, Samsung, Sony, Nissan, Mitsubishi, NEC (Nippon Electric Company), SEL(Semiconductor Energy Laboratory), Bosch, Toshiba, Yuasa, Commissariat and Denso. The total number of Top15 patents alone reached 8554.

Among them, Panasonic, Toyota and LG, the top three, all have patent reserves exceeding 1000, namely 1791, 1584 and 1182, accounting for 53% of the total number of Top15 patents.

A large number of Top 15 companies are Japanese, with only a few South Korea and German companies. Most of them are electronic and electrical related companies, while there are a small number of automobile enterprises, among which Toyota ranks second in the number of patent applications and has a deep accumulation of technology.

From the perspective of high-strength patents, Toyota not only has a large number of patent applications in the battery field, but also has a high quality, ranking first in the high-strength patent list with 59 results.

In second place is Sony, a total of 47 high-strength patents. In fact, Sony has a total of 653 patents, ranking only sixth in the total list, which shows that its high-intensity patents account for a high proportion.

The third to eighth places are Samsung, Panasonic, LG, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Nissan. The ninth and tenth places are Thermo Fisher Technology (Thermo Fisher Scientific), which did not enter the previous total list, and the American start-up company Zion Power (Sion Power). It is reported that the lithium-sulfur battery developed by the company has three times the energy density of traditional lithium-ion batteries and can drive electric vehicles up to 300 miles.

Let's add the patent age as a parameter and look at the Top20 patents together.

The vertical axis is the patent strength mentioned above, the horizontal axis is the average age of the patent, and the circular area is still the total number of patent applications mentioned above. From this we can see that Panasonic, despite the large number of patent applications, is basically in the short-term life of the patent range, and the overall quality is not high.

LG and Toyota are also in the range of patent strength is not high, but the patent life is longer, of which LG patents are longer than Toyota.

Samsung, Sony, and Nissan are in the shorter patent life, but the overall patent strength is relatively high. Mitsubishi is a shorter, higher strength of a patent feature.

It is generally believed that the patents with the highest value belong to the longer term and higher intensity, that is, the upper right corner of the upward chart is concentrated, while in the battery field, the "upper right corner" company is quite lacking.

· · Future trends

Next we will look at the development trend of battery technology patents.

The area of the box in the figure indicates the number of patents in the field, while the color indicates the heat of patent application activity in the field. The redder the color, the more popular the future patent applications in this field; green indicates that there will be fewer related applications in the future; yellow indicates an intermediate level.

The charging technology in the lower right corner will be the biggest hot spot for future battery technology patent applications. The "fast charging technology" that we are familiar with every day is by no means groundless.

The future trend of battery technology patent applications also lies in the research and development of battery materials, hot spots are colloidal polymers, inorganic compounds and other materials.

The lithium battery related technology is located in the green area on the left, has been in a relatively saturated stage of development, the future activity will be relatively low, similar direction and electrochemical performance research and the development of oxide and hydroxide materials (don't think, here is a material, not an OS).

Overall, Japan has the largest number of patent applications, followed by the United States. Germany and South Korea also performed well.

In addition to geographical distribution, the commercial value of patents is also worthy of our attention. How much profit has been taken away from the battery industry in terms of patent licensing, and when we talk about innovation-driven, if we want to transform into such a model, we need to work hard.

The smart internal reference once summarized the list of 200 suppliers released by Apple in the first half of the year (you can click here to review it), from which we can also get a glimpse of the global territory of the electronics manufacturing industry. At that time, we saw the influence of China as a major manufacturing country, and Silicon Valley startups shipped goods across the ocean in Shenzhen, all due to the value of my country's complete manufacturing capabilities.

However, when we focus on the specific field of batteries, and find out the technology accumulation of various companies from the perspective of patents, we will find that the gap is so large that Japan's electronics, electrical, and automotive industries are all digging into batteries. So deep. South Korea multinational companies such as LG and Samsung also regard battery research and development as their important competitiveness.

Energy as the entire electronics industry, especially the foundation of the role of hardware in the mobile Internet era, its importance is self-evident.

Countless domestic researchers have racked their brains in the direction of batteries, intensive cultivation, but in the actual application level, high quality batteries are still dependent on overseas giants.

In terms of communications, there are excellent private enterprises such as ZTE and Huawei, as well as global state-owned enterprises such as China Mobile. In terms of batteries, there is obviously no benchmark at this level in China.

However, if new energy vehicles and intelligent transportation become a radical development consensus in the automotive industry, and if industrial transformation is also a major challenge facing my country's economic development, then integrating domestic battery-related research and development capabilities and firmly holding key energy technologies in their own hands Obviously, adding a few pages of PPT with car companies and pulling out new product lines can create greater value.