To find competitors and analyze competitors, we must first know which competitors there are. This part looks for competitors by ranking various patents. Figure 1 reflects the ranking of patent applicants in all kinds of patents, in which the abscissa is the ranking index and the ordinate is the ranking order. The ranking indicators on the abscissa include the total number of applications, the number of applications in recent ten years, the number of multilateral patent applications, the number of effective patents, the number of core patents and the number of applications for various technologies. Among them, the total number of applications reflects the technical activity of a company, but it cannot truly reflect the technical strength of the company. For example, Japanese companies are used to applying for patents for minor technological improvements, resulting in a huge number of patents; In addition, many interrelated technologies can be merged into 1 patent applications in other countries, but in Japan, they must be submitted according to multiple patent applications. Therefore, the total number of applications cannot be used as the only criterion to determine competitors.
Total number of applications in recent years: used to identify potential competitors. Because a company entered this field late, the total number of applications is not high, but in recent years, the number of applications is high, so it is a potential competitor that should be concerned. Number of multilateral patent applications: Under normal circumstances, applicants will submit patent applications for technologies with market expectations in many countries, especially the main sales destination countries of products, in order to obtain more economic benefits.
Therefore, multilateral patent applications represent more important patents, and the number of important patents has become one of the important indicators to measure the technical strength of competitors. Effective number of patents: patent rights need to pay an annual fee to remain valid. Not all patents can survive to the deadline, and patents with poor market prospects or lost market value will expire before the expiration of the protection period due to reasons such as the right holder's failure to pay the annual fee. Therefore, the number of valid patents can reflect the innovation ability and market competitiveness of enterprises.
1. Analysis of technical advantages and disadvantages This part analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of competitors through the percentage of their patents in each technical branch in the total patents of that technical branch. The higher the percentage, the greater the advantage. The total number of applications, multilateral patent applications and valid patents are used as evaluation indicators. Figure 2 can reflect the advantages and disadvantages of patent applicants in various technical branches, in which the abscissa is the total number of applications, the number of multilateral patent applications and the number of effective patents, and the ordinate is each technical branch; The pie chart shows the number of patents in each technology branch, and the size of the pie chart shows the number of patents. The bigger the pie, the more patents, and the dark color indicates the proportion of competitors. The two evaluation indexes of multilateral patent application and effective patent are the main basis for evaluating the applicant's patent. As can be seen from Figure 2, this competitor has obvious advantages in technical branch 1 and technical branch 2, but is relatively weak in technical branch 3 and technical branch 5.
2. Analysis of technology update cycle The technology update cycle refers to the average time interval between all patents of a company in a certain technology field and the patents cited by it, which reflects the overall speed of the company's technology development. If the value is small, it means that the company can use the latest technology and make technological innovation faster on this basis; The larger the value, the slower the company responds to technological change, and the easier it is to lose the opportunity of technological innovation and lag behind others. An enterprise that wins by technology should always evaluate the technology update cycle of itself and its competitors in order to understand its position in this field and make adjustments in time.
3. Analysis of patent strategy According to the purpose of patent application, patent strategy can be divided into two categories, one is defensive to prevent infringement of patent rights of others; The other is offensive, which prevents others from infringing their own patents, thus charging patent licensing fees or monopolizing the market. It can be analyzed by the proportion of enterprises' applications abroad to the total patent technology and the number of patent litigation activities. If a competitor has a large proportion of foreign applications, it indicates that the enterprise will enter and occupy foreign markets; If there are many active patent lawsuits, it shows that the company is a patent offensive opponent and should attract enough attention from peers. In addition, by analyzing the application characteristics, cooperative application status and R&D team status of competitors' subsidiaries, we can further understand the technical characteristics of competitors.