For the 22nd straight year, IBM has been granted the most number of United States patents. While the achievement is an unprecedented feat, the question right now is whether the company will be able to turn its innovations into revenue.
IBM was granted 7,534 patents in 2014, much higher compared to Samsung's 4,952 patents and Canon's 4,055 patents. Sony, which was granted 3,224 patents, and Microsoft, which was granted 2,829 patents, round out the top five.
IBM is the first company to receive more than 7,000 patents within a year.
Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, is focusing on newer tech spaces such as data analytics and cloud computing to address the decreasing revenue levels of the company, along with the expected decline in its yearly profit this year, which would be the first instance since 2002.
Last year, 40 percent of IBM's patents were granted to the company for work related to the growth initiatives of IBM.
"IBM's continued investment in research and development is key to driving the transformation of our company," Rometty said.
However, despite these investments, the customers of IBM are decreasing their spending on the company's offerings. Sales have been decreasing for three consecutive years, made worse by divestitures and lower demand for IBM's services and products.
Back in October, Rometty surprised IBM's investors by dropping a long-standing earnings goal and releasing a projection of an operating profit decline of between 2 percent to 4 percent for the year 2014.
The annual list of patents granted to companies show where they are looking for opportunities. For IBM, the target spaces aside from the aforementioned data analytics and cloud computing are security offerings and mobile-centric and social-centric products.
The annual spending of IBM on research and development is about $6 billion. This has led to the dominance of the company in terms of the number of granted patents, and has resulted in the development of products such as the Watson supercomputer for data analytics.
However, the spending only represents around 6 percent of IBM's annual revenue. Other tech companies such as Google, Cisco and Oracle spend around 13 percent of their revenue for research and development.
More companies based in the United States were able to enter the top 10 in the list of companies with the most number of patents. Google made it into the top 10 for the first time, joining Microsoft and Qualcomm that have been in the top 10 since last year.
Apple just missed the top 10, rising up two spots from 2013 to 11th place.
