Who Files the Most Patents? Ranked Every Year, 1980-2021

Who files the most patents, 1980-2021 Japan files the most patents every year from 1980 to 2009. China passes it in 2010 and by 2021 files more than the next four together. The United States, South Korea and Germany complete the top five. Every value, share and total on screen is recomputed from the data at render time, never typed in. CHAPTERS 0:00 1980s 1:36 1990s 3:42 2000s 5:44 2010s 7:50 2020s 8:04 2021 - final ranking Music: Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), edited. www.scottbuckley.com.au -------------------- DATA Patent applications filed at each country's own patent office by applicants based there ("resident" applications in WIPO's terms; the US office counts by the first-named inventor's residence, Taiwan's by the first applicant's nationality), 1980-2021. A raw count, in thousands - NOT per capita. Source: WIPO Patent Report: Statistics on Worldwide Patent Activity, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), via the World Bank (World Development Indicators, indicator IP.PAT.RESD). "The International Bureau of WIPO assumes no responsibility with respect to the transformation of these data." https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/... World Bank, public licenses for datasets: https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/pub... "The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license allows users to copy, modify and distribute data in any format for any purpose, including commercial use. Users are only obligated to give appropriate credit (attribution) and indicate if they have made any changes, including translations." Taiwan (not in the World Bank series), 1993-2021: Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO), reports to 2007, open data from 2008: https://data.gov.tw/dataset/6435 Open Government Data License 1.0: https://data.gov.tw/license -------------------- METHOD 122 countries and territories; the chart shows each year's top 12 plus the next one. Values in thousands, converted from the counts WIPO and TIPO publish; no per-capita ratio, no smoothing. Between two years, bars and figures glide from one published value to the next. Most years last ten seconds; the video slows around each shock year below: about 28 seconds for it, 14 for the years either side. The first, 1980, lasts five; the final ranking is held for 12 seconds. Excluded: aggregates (World, regions, economic groups, the EU). Interpolated: 474 cells of 4,067 (11.65 %), years missing between two published years, filled by a straight line. Nothing is extrapolated; a published zero stays zero. 20 of these filled values are inside the 13 bars on screen: Italy 1981-1984, 1989-1991, 1995, 1997-1998, 2001-2006, 2015; Japan 1981-1982; Iran 2015. Those bars follow a straight line between the published years. Excluded: 36 countries and territories that never reach a visible rank and whose records have gaps and cover less than 40 % of the years. 22 series stop before 2021 in the source and are not extended (the largest: Kazakhstan, last value 2020). Filings abroad are not counted (a Japanese firm's at the US office, a German firm's at the European Patent Office); counting them would change the ranking. North Korea is also excluded: its series has gaps and covers under 40 % of the years; it would rank 11th to 14th in the 11 years it reports, but is left out rather than shown blinking or invented. Shortened on screen: South Korea, Iran, Russia, Turkey (World Bank: "Korea, Rep.", "Iran, Islamic Rep.", "Russian Federation", "Turkiye"). -------------------- THE RIGHT-HAND COLUMN GLOBAL BREAKDOWN is WORLD (the sum of all 122 entries) by continent (UN M49), with shares and yearly change. It is below the World Bank's world figure (published from 1985): 25 to 30 % in 1985-1989, 20 % in 1990, 3 to 8 % from 1991. The source has no USSR, East Germany, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia; Russia starts in 1992. -------------------- SHOCK YEARS A year runs in slow motion when it is in the worst 8 % of the series for the fall of the world total, or for the share of countries declining (counted only when the world total also falls). Detected in the data, not chosen: 3 of 42 years, 1994, 2009, 2019. -------------------- FLAGS flagcdn.com - public domain. -------------------- CHRONICLE The events on screen come from an editorial file with no figure the chart computes: no application counts, percentages or rank numbers. Each of the 42 years has at least two sources (94 in all) and a written counter-argument. An independent reviewer read every account, briefed to find what is wrong. It rejected 12, each researched and reviewed again in a single correction pass: 7 were rewritten or replaced, and 5 kept their on-screen text. A last review on 28 September 2026 rewrote 1 account and set 13 titles in sentence case.