Asia’s patent offices carry the volume while Western megacaps in software, chips and medtech do most of the heavy filing. Drug majors are riding older IP waves instead of driving the boom.
According to fresh WIPO data, innovators filed a record 3.7 million patent applications in 2024, up 4.9% from 2023 and the fastest growth since 2018. Asia’s IP offices now receive the majority of filings worldwide, and China alone accounts for nearly half of global applications by office. Computer technology has emerged as the single biggest field in global patent filings, representing about 13% of published applications and growing faster over the past decade than any other major technology category.
Look at who is doing the filing and a pattern emerges. The volume story belongs to Asia, and within the Western megacap universe it belongs to Big Tech and its hardware cousins, not to the drug majors.
China continues to dominant in terms of raw numbers
China now files more patents, by far, than any other country, but its patent explosion did not come out of nowhere. For years, provincial and city governments paid cash subsidies for each filing, which encouraged companies and universities to chase volume. Beijing has been trying to unwind that model since, ordering local patent subsidies to be phased out by 2025 and pushing the system toward higher value invention patents rather than easy utility models and designs. Even with that pivot, China still dominates the international channel. PCT filings were essentially flat at about 273,900 in 2024, and China still led with just over 70,000 international applications, ahead of the United States and Japan.
Data from WIPO
Some medtech and diagnostics companies are patenting aggressively
The company level split reflects deeper structural differences in how sectors compete, and that same pattern is now visible in healthcare. Medtech and diagnostics companies behave like platform tech firms that keep stacking patents on robotics, imaging, software and data plumbing. Many large pharma companies, by contrast, are living off earlier filing waves, adding selective new families rather than driving today’s global patent boom.
To see how this plays out at company level, we pulled IFI sourced data from Google’s public patents dataset and counted distinct global patent families with at least one publication between January and October 2024 for a set of S&P 100 names in tech, pharma and medtech. In this slice, Roche shows roughly nine thousand patent families, more than Alphabet and about double Microsoft. Medtronic lands in the low thousands, outpacing many well known Big Pharmas. Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Novo Nordisk appear with only a few hundred 2024 families each. These counts reflect inventions from 2022 and 2023 due to the 18-month publication delay. In other words, the companies minting much of today’s life science profit are not the ones flooding the patent offices. The heavy, continual patenting is coming from Big Tech, medtech and diagnostics, with Asia’s offices setting the overall volume backdrop.
The geography of innovation
If you zoom out from individual firms, the geography of innovation looks very different from the stock market league tables. WIPO data show that patent offices in Asia now receive roughly 70% of all applications worldwide, up from around 60% a decade ago, with China’s office alone handling close to half of global filings by office. At the family level, unique inventions have more than doubled since the late 2000s, and applicants in China now account for nearly 70% of patent families by origin. Yet when you look at foreign-oriented families, inventions that are protected in more than one jurisdiction, the United States still leads, with Japan, Germany and a handful of European economies close behind. Asia owns the volume, but the broad, export-grade filings that multinationals rely on for global markets still skew toward the older innovation hubs.
The follow table (methodology note below) shows the strength of the Big Pharma and diagnostics giant in terms of total patent families and the dominance of Big Tech in recent granted patent families,
| Company | Total Patent Families 2024 | US Families | International Families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roche | 8,349 | 781 | 7,955 |
| Alphabet | 5,638 | 3,593 | 3,181 |
| Microsoft | 4,209 | 2,601 | 2,765 |
| Amazon | 1,768 | 1,504 | 382 |
| Medtronic | 1,478 | 768 | 892 |
| Merck | 1,204 | 389 | 998 |
| Regeneron | 710 | 279 | 615 |
| Edwards Lifesciences | 707 | 305 | 571 |
| Stryker | 695 | 448 | 392 |
| GE HealthCare | 579 | 457 | 207 |
| Intuitive Surgical | 542 | 368 | 269 |
| Amgen | 541 | 200 | 458 |
| Novartis | 513 | 191 | 440 |
| Eli Lilly | 409 | 127 | 368 |
| Johnson & Johnson | 377 | 167 | 272 |
| Pfizer | 362 | 130 | 314 |
| Bristol Myers Squibb | 356 | 146 | 297 |
| GSK | 274 | 120 | 207 |
| Thermo Fisher | 209 | 78 | 176 |
| Boston Scientific | 186 | 93 | 133 |
| BioNTech | 175 | 39 | 166 |
| Moderna | 172 | 73 | 128 |
| Novo Nordisk | 168 | 64 | 138 |
| AbbVie | 135 | 63 | 97 |
How pharma patent rates fare
Big drug makers, by contrast, show a very different pattern. Companies such as Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Pfizer are generating huge cash flows from obesity, diabetes and oncology products, but their 2024 patent family counts look modest next to both medtech and Big Tech. That does not mean they are idle. It reflects a different IP strategy. Originator pharma can live for a long time off a few well-timed, broad patent families around a flagship drug and its formulation, supplemented by regulatory exclusivities, manufacturing know-how and in-licensing. Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 franchise, for instance, rests on a relatively narrow patent estate built over decades, not thousands of annual filings. When they do file, the footprint is narrower, aimed at a short list of high-value markets rather than a global saturation strategy.`
Methodology note for the company-level numbers
- WIPO data: Global application, technology field and patent family statistics come from the latest World Intellectual Property Indicators and related WIPO datasets.
- Company sample: For firm-level comparisons, we focused on a subset of S&P 100 companies in technology, pharma and medtech.
- Data source: We used the Google Patents public BigQuery tables, which incorporate IFI Claims Patent Services harmonized assignee names. For each company, we built a “hero group” that bundles the parent with major subsidiaries and common name variants, then matched these using regular expressions on the harmonized assignee field.
- Metric: We counted distinct global patent families with at least one publication between January and October 2024, and we split them into US and international families based on publication authority. Each family is counted once per hero group, even if it contains multiple publications.
- Caveats: Publication dates lag underlying R&D and priority filings by roughly 18 months, so 2024 publications mostly reflect inventions from earlier years. Company-level counts depend on name harmonization quality and may undercount very recent corporate restructurings or minority-owned ventures.
