Samsung Never Blinks, TSMC Is Coming, and IBM Just Walked Away: Inside 1.8M Electricity Patents

CPC section H is “Electricity” — and its H01–H05 classes (H0*) cover the hardware layer of the modern economy: semiconductor devices, circuits, power generation, and every kind of communication technology. Between 2016 and 2025 the USPTO issued about 1.8 million patents whose primary classification falls in H0* — roughly 29% of all grants¹, the biggest single slice of the patent system. This post is about who's winning it, and how fast the leaderboard is turning over underneath a category total that barely moves.

The main players — five very different trajectories

The ten most prolific H0* assignees together account for 231,207 grants over the decade — 12.9% of the category. Here are the top five, year by year (hover for exact values); the full top-10 breakdown, including Huawei, Sony, Ericsson, Intel, and Apple, is in the table below.

• Samsung Electronics is a metronome. Between 4,286 and 4,679 grants every single year — the decade total of 44,855 is 60% ahead of second place, and that's the parent company alone (Samsung Display and Samsung Electro-Mechanics file separately and aren't included).
• TSMC is the biggest riser: from ~2,300 a year through 2019 to a peak of 3,750 in 2024 (+63% over its early-decade base), passing LG and Qualcomm to take second place for the decade.
• Qualcomm carved a V: 3,147 in 2016, down to ~1,850 through the 2018–2021 trough, then a sharp recovery to 3,488 by 2023.
• IBM exited the category. The most dramatic move on the chart: ~3,500 grants a year through 2018, then a collapse to 500 by 2025 — an 86% decline that tracks IBM's well-publicized 2020 decision to stop chasing patent-count leadership. Sony shows a shallower version of the same slide (1,918 → 972).
• The rank 6–10 pack is steady: their combined output stays in a 7,100–9,700 band, with Huawei nearly doubling (1,374 → 2,679) inside it while Sony shrank — churn within the pack, stability in aggregate.

The four biggest movers

Full annual breakdown, top 10

The bottom row puts the whole field in view: the H0* category as a whole held between 168K and 199K grants a year — while individual leaders swung by factors of two and seven inside it.