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Building an arsenal: Samsung filed 3 times more smartphone patents than Apple in 2013

Published Jun 24th, 2014 9:05AM EDT
Samsung Patents

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Samsung has apparently had enough of being bullied by Apple in the global smartphone patent war, and it has no intentions of taking the matter sitting down. According to Thomson Reuters’ 2014 State of Innovation Report, Samsung filed a whopping 2,179 smartphone patents last year, including 1,362 related to semiconductor materials and processes. That staggering figure is more than three times the 647 mobile telephony patents Apple filed in 2013.

Apple, long known for launching aggressive patent attacks on various longtime players, was ranked fourth among companies filing smartphone patents in the U.S. last year. Ahead of it was Qualcomm with 1,383 mobile telephony patents, BlackBerry with 854 patents and Intel with 697.

In the APAC region, Samsung led fellow tech giants in the region by a wide margin. LG filed 1,678 smartphone patents in 2013 according to the report, and Sony filed 1,071.

In Europe, Thomson Reuters noted that Ericsson led the pack with 831 smartphone patents, followed by Nokia with 549 and Alcatel with 321.

The full report can be found below in our source section.

Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 10 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.