Bangalore: International Business Machines Corp, better known as New-York based IBM, came out as the leader for the 19^th consecutive time with respect to number of patents granted last year. Bloomberg reported that Virginia Rometty, IBM’s recently appointed CEO, considers the filing of patents as part of the company’s strategy to advance in the fields of cloud computing, and analytics.

Competition is becoming tight though, as a number of Asian firms such as Samsung (which came in second after IBM), are closing in on IBM said a researcher from IFI Claims Patent Services. Canon, Panasonic, and Toshiba, (all Japanese companies) took consecutive places after Samsung, thus demoting previously second place holding Microsoft to the sixth position on the list. Intel, which occupied 8^th place, currently occupies 16^th place, while tech giants such as Apple only appeared among the top 50 firms. On the list of companies that were granted the most number of patents, 8 out of the top 10 were Asian, and only two were American. Around half of the top 50 firms were from Asia.

Samsung, according to IFI, is a firm that IBM’s reign could be threatened by. The Korean firm whose growth last year was measured at 8 percent outgrew Big Blue by 3 percent, and it filed more patent applications (which are an indication of future grants) than IBM in the past two years.

IBM’s strategy so far, according to Manny Schecter, IBM’s chief patent counsel, has been to affect trends in technology by promoting certain standards, and to allow other companies to innovate in that area without suing them even if its patents are infringed upon, and it has been successful. According to Chris Andrews, a spokesperson for IBM, around 20,000 innovations are recorded at the company annually, of which only some are submitted for patents.

Interestingly, Schecter stated that IBM spends less time in courts than its competitors since the large range of patents provides it with licensing revenue as well as defense against intellectual-property infringement lawsuits.