Medical Technology — Technology Leaders Europe
Who files medical-technology patents from Europe, which corporate groups those filings consolidate into once name variants are resolved, and which other technology fields the same groups are active in.
Executive Summary
What the European medical-technology patent landscape looks like once applicant names are consolidated into corporate groups.
Between 2015 and 2024, applicants domiciled in the 39 EPO contracting states filed 98,136 DOCDB patent families that carry the WIPO technology field Medical technology. Those families comprise 370,837 patent applications worldwide and are spread across 44,749 distinct applicant entities — a long tail in which no single filer holds even a tenth of the set.
PATSTAT records applicants by name, not by corporate identity, so the raw ranking splits groups across legal entities and spelling variants. After consolidating the largest filers into corporate groups on the applicant name, the twenty largest groups together hold 23,915 families, or 24.4% of the European set. The largest is Koninklijke Philips with 7,434 families (7.6%), ahead of Siemens Healthineers (3,627) and the European entities of Johnson & Johnson's MedTech business (2,217). Consolidation matters: Philips alone is reached through two case variants of the same name plus an OCR-damaged spelling, and Siemens Healthineers files through three separate legal entities in two countries.
Filing volume is broadly flat across the window. Complete filing years run from 9,516 families in 2015 to 10,227 in 2022, with a peak of 11,599 in 2020; the four-year cohort 2019–2022 holds 43,121 families against 39,114 in 2015–2018, a rise of 10.2%. Germany is the most frequent applicant country (26,106 families, 26.6% of the set), followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom.
The twenty largest groups are not equally committed to the field. Their medical-technology share of their own patent portfolio ranges from 98.5% at SHL Medical down to 1.0% at Robert Bosch, and their combined portfolio of 93,333 families touches all 35 WIPO technology fields — twelve of which contain at least one family from every one of the twenty groups. That overlap is the practical point of this report: a patent offered for licensing in Measurement, Computer technology or Optics reaches the same set of companies as one offered in medical technology itself.
The European medical-technology field is wide rather than concentrated: 44,749 applicant entities, of which the twenty largest groups hold under a quarter of all families. Two structural features shape any reading of the ranking — corporate groups fragment across legal entities and name spellings, and the WIPO field itself is an IPC-derived mapping that also admits inhalation devices and cosmetic applicators. Both are quantified in the sections that follow.
Filing Trend 2015–2024
Patent families by earliest filing year of the family. European applicants, WIPO field 13.
Across the eight complete filing years the series moves within a narrow band: from 9,516 families in 2015 to 10,227 in 2022, with the highest value in 2020 at 11,599. Comparing the two complete four-year cohorts, 2019–2022 holds 43,121 families against 39,114 in 2015–2018, a rise of 10.2%. The apparent fall after 2022 is publication lag, not a change in filing behaviour — see the note below.
* 2023 and 2024 are provisional. PATSTAT Spring 2026 (patstat_2026a) cannot yet contain applications that are still unpublished, and the ~18-month publication delay affects the two most recent filing years. Every period comparison in this report is cut so that no period ends inside 2023 or 2024.
Data table: Families by earliest filing year
| Filing year | Patent families | Change vs. previous year |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 9,516 | — |
| 2016 | 9,740 | +2.4% |
| 2017 | 9,947 | +2.1% |
| 2018 | 9,911 | −0.4% |
| 2019 | 10,093 | +1.8% |
| 2020 | 11,599 | +14.9% |
| 2021 | 11,202 | −3.4% |
| 2022 | 10,227 | −8.7% |
| 2023* | 9,257 | −9.5%* |
| 2024* | 6,644 | −28.2%* |
| Total 2015–2024 | 98,136 | — |
The Twenty Largest Applicant Groups
Ranked by patent families in the European medical-technology set, after consolidating legal entities and name variants into corporate groups.
Bar colour marks the domicile of the group parent, not of the filing entity: teal = European-headquartered group, dark = group headquartered outside Europe, blue = European public research organisation. The country in brackets is the parent domicile; the table below also gives the applicant country PATSTAT records most often for that group.
Koninklijke Philips holds 7,434 families, twice the next group and 7.6% of the whole European set. Below the top three the distribution flattens quickly: the fourth group holds 1,146 families and the twentieth 374. Three of the twenty are European filing entities of groups headquartered outside Europe (Johnson & Johnson, Olympus, Baxter) and two are French public research organisations. The steepest four-year rises are at Smith & Nephew (+175%) and Karl Storz (+158%); the steepest fall is at Novartis (−89%), which coincides with the 2019 separation of its eye-care business into Alcon — Alcon's own count rises 33% over the same two cohorts.
Data table: Twenty largest applicant groups
| Applicant group | Type | Parent domicile | Applicant country in PATSTAT | Families 2015–2024 | 2015–2018 | 2019–2022 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koninklijke Philips | Company | Netherlands | NL | 7,434 | 3,561 | 2,800 | −21.4% |
| Siemens Healthineers | Company | Germany | DE | 3,627 | 1,524 | 1,451 | −4.8% |
| Johnson & Johnson (MedTech) | Company | United States | CH | 2,217 | 720 | 1,135 | +57.6% |
| B. Braun | Company | Germany | DE | 1,146 | 383 | 501 | +30.8% |
| Biotronik | Company | Germany | DE | 908 | 279 | 412 | +47.7% |
| Carl Zeiss | Company | Germany | DE | 857 | 299 | 391 | +30.8% |
| Alcon | Company | Switzerland | CH | 840 | 281 | 375 | +33.5% |
| Sanofi | Company | France | FR | 783 | 408 | 270 | −33.8% |
| Fresenius | Company | Germany | DE | 781 | 367 | 315 | −14.2% |
| Roche | Company | Switzerland | CH | 671 | 221 | 320 | +44.8% |
| Olympus | Company | Japan | DE | 658 | 311 | 246 | −20.9% |
| Smith & Nephew | Company | United Kingdom | CH | 618 | 126 | 347 | +175.4% |
| CNRS | Research | France | FR | 601 | 239 | 274 | +14.6% |
| Karl Storz | Company | Germany | DE | 560 | 123 | 317 | +157.7% |
| Baxter | Company | United States | CH | 533 | 194 | 251 | +29.4% |
| SHL Medical | Company | Switzerland | CH | 511 | 162 | 185 | +14.2% |
| Inserm | Research | France | FR | 455 | 179 | 192 | +7.3% |
| Robert Bosch | Company | Germany | DE | 407 | 214 | 156 | −27.1% |
| Novartis | Company | Switzerland | CH | 387 | 339 | 37 | −89.1% |
| L’Oréal | Company | France | FR | 374 | 128 | 181 | +41.4% |
| Twenty groups, distinct families | 23,915 | 24.4% of the 98,136-family set | |||||
Why the twenty rows sum to more than the group total. The individual counts add up to 24,368 while only 23,915 distinct families are involved, an excess of 453 group memberships: families held by more than one of the twenty groups are counted once under each. The "Change" column compares the two complete four-year cohorts 2015–2018 and 2019–2022 and deliberately excludes the provisional years 2023–2024, so it is not a change over the full window. Parent domicile is a manual attribution from public corporate information, not a PATSTAT field; every other column comes from a query.
How Specialised Is Each Group?
Medical technology as a share of the group's own European patent portfolio, 2015–2024.
The twenty groups split into three bands. Seven are device specialists above 90% — SHL Medical, Johnson & Johnson MedTech, Smith & Nephew, Olympus, Karl Storz, Biotronik and B. Braun — for whom medical technology is effectively the whole portfolio. Six sit between 55% and 90%, with a substantial second leg: Siemens Healthineers puts 40.0% of its portfolio in Computer technology and 37.4% in Measurement, Koninklijke Philips 25.4% in Computer technology. Seven hold under a quarter of their portfolio in the field — Roche and Novartis because they are pharmaceutical groups with a diagnostics arm, Carl Zeiss because 64.8% of its portfolio is Optics, and Robert Bosch because 407 medical-technology families sit inside a portfolio of 41,245.
Data table: Medical-technology share and largest adjacent fields
| Applicant group | MedTech families | Total portfolio | MedTech share | Largest adjacent field | Second adjacent field |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHL Medical | 511 | 519 | 98.5% | Computer technology 2.9% | Chemical engineering 2.5% |
| Johnson & Johnson (MedTech) | 2,217 | 2,264 | 97.9% | Computer technology 5.4% | Audio-visual technology 3.1% |
| Smith & Nephew | 618 | 632 | 97.8% | Computer technology 5.9% | Measurement 2.5% |
| Olympus | 658 | 692 | 95.1% | Optics 14.9% | Electrical machinery 9.4% |
| Karl Storz | 560 | 592 | 94.6% | Optics 23.0% | Mechanical elements 9.0% |
| Biotronik | 908 | 961 | 94.5% | Electrical machinery 8.0% | Digital communication 3.0% |
| B. Braun | 1,146 | 1,247 | 91.9% | Handling 8.7% | Measurement 6.6% |
| Baxter | 533 | 624 | 85.4% | Chemical engineering 16.0% | Pharmaceuticals 7.7% |
| Fresenius | 781 | 936 | 83.4% | Chemical engineering 10.3% | Computer technology 8.5% |
| Alcon | 840 | 1,103 | 76.2% | Optics 26.4% | Other special machines 13.7% |
| Siemens Healthineers | 3,627 | 5,032 | 72.1% | Computer technology 40.0% | Measurement 37.4% |
| Koninklijke Philips | 7,434 | 12,123 | 61.3% | Computer technology 25.4% | Measurement 13.5% |
| Sanofi | 783 | 1,359 | 57.6% | Pharmaceuticals 35.1% | Biotechnology 25.1% |
| Novartis | 387 | 1,691 | 22.9% | Pharmaceuticals 66.9% | Biotechnology 30.7% |
| Roche | 671 | 3,699 | 18.1% | Pharmaceuticals 41.7% | Biotechnology 38.6% |
| Carl Zeiss | 857 | 5,232 | 16.4% | Optics 64.8% | Measurement 31.3% |
| Inserm | 455 | 3,039 | 15.0% | Pharmaceuticals 62.6% | Biotechnology 47.0% |
| CNRS | 601 | 6,611 | 9.1% | Pharmaceuticals 21.9% | Biotechnology 18.3% |
| L’Oréal | 374 | 5,556 | 6.7% | Organic fine chemistry 71.7% | Other consumer goods 22.5% |
| Robert Bosch | 407 | 41,245 | 1.0% | Transport 25.7% | Electrical machinery 22.0% |
These shares do not add to 100%. A patent family carries a WIPO field whenever any of its members holds that field with a weight of at least 0.25, and most families carry more than one. The percentages are therefore share of the group's families that touch a field, not slices of a pie: Roche's 41.7% Pharmaceuticals, 38.6% Biotechnology and 18.1% medical technology overlap heavily. "Total portfolio" counts each family once, across all fields.
Cross-Sector Reach — All 35 WIPO Technology Fields
The combined portfolio of the twenty largest groups: 93,333 families, and how many of the twenty are present in each field.
The twenty groups hold at least one family in every one of the 35 WIPO technology fields, and in twelve fields all twenty are present — Medical technology, Measurement, Computer technology, Electrical machinery, Control, Audio-visual technology, Machine tools, Digital communication, Chemical engineering, Other consumer goods, Other special machines and Handling. Field size and field breadth are different things: Transport is the fifth-largest field at 10,943 families but only 14 of the 20 groups appear in it, and 10,611 of those 10,943 come from Robert Bosch alone. Measurement is the opposite case — 15,415 families spread across all twenty groups.
Data table: All 35 WIPO technology fields
| Technology field | WIPO sector | Families | Groups present (of 20) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medical technology | Instruments | 23,915 | 20 |
| Measurement | Instruments | 15,415 | 20 |
| Computer technology | Electrical engineering | 13,355 | 20 |
| Electrical machinery, apparatus, energy | Electrical engineering | 12,385 | 20 |
| Transport | Mechanical engineering | 10,943 | 14 |
| Organic fine chemistry | Chemistry | 6,320 | 15 |
| Pharmaceuticals | Chemistry | 6,123 | 19 |
| Optics | Instruments | 5,885 | 16 |
| Engines, pumps, turbines | Mechanical engineering | 5,418 | 18 |
| Biotechnology | Chemistry | 4,738 | 17 |
| Control | Instruments | 4,532 | 20 |
| Mechanical elements | Mechanical engineering | 4,436 | 18 |
| Audio-visual technology | Electrical engineering | 3,033 | 20 |
| Machine tools | Mechanical engineering | 2,859 | 20 |
| Digital communication | Electrical engineering | 2,762 | 20 |
| Chemical engineering | Chemistry | 2,556 | 20 |
| Other consumer goods | Other fields | 2,239 | 20 |
| Analysis of biological materials | Instruments | 2,235 | 19 |
| Other special machines | Mechanical engineering | 2,100 | 20 |
| Semiconductors | Electrical engineering | 2,064 | 16 |
| Environmental technology | Chemistry | 1,952 | 15 |
| Handling | Mechanical engineering | 1,813 | 20 |
| Micro-structural and nano-technology | Chemistry | 1,494 | 13 |
| Telecommunications | Electrical engineering | 1,359 | 19 |
| Surface technology, coating | Chemistry | 1,289 | 19 |
| Materials, metallurgy | Chemistry | 1,136 | 17 |
| IT methods for management | Electrical engineering | 1,029 | 19 |
| Thermal processes and apparatus | Mechanical engineering | 1,007 | 14 |
| Macromolecular chemistry, polymers | Chemistry | 821 | 17 |
| Basic communication processes | Electrical engineering | 748 | 14 |
| Basic materials chemistry | Chemistry | 743 | 17 |
| Furniture, games | Other fields | 654 | 15 |
| Civil engineering | Other fields | 467 | 11 |
| Textile and paper machines | Mechanical engineering | 307 | 16 |
| Food chemistry | Chemistry | 199 | 10 |
| Combined portfolio, distinct families | 93,333 | 20 | |
Field totals are non-exclusive and sum above the portfolio total. The 35 field counts add to far more than 93,333 because a family that carries several WIPO fields at weight ≥ 0.25 appears under each of them. Use the column to compare fields with one another, not to partition the portfolio. "Groups present" counts a group once per field regardless of how many families it holds there, which is why a field can be large and narrow (Transport) or moderate and universal (Machine tools).
Geography — Where Applicants Sit and Where They File
Applicant domicile across the 39 EPO contracting states, and the offices the resulting families reach.
Germany accounts for 26,106 of the 98,136 families (26.6%), more than twice the next country. Switzerland (11,615), the Netherlands (10,438), France (9,783) and the United Kingdom (9,594) form a second band, and the remaining 34 states share the rest. Between the two complete cohorts the shares move only slightly for the large countries — Germany 28.4% → 25.5%, Switzerland 11.0% → 12.2% — while two smaller ones grow from a low base: Turkey from 1,004 to 2,114 families and Ireland from 802 to 1,495. Those two are also the countries whose trajectory is least settled: 25.4% of Turkey's families and 22.0% of Ireland's fall in the provisional years 2023–2024, against 16.2% for the set and 11.7–17.7% for every other country in the table. On the filing side, the complete 2015–2022 cohort reaches the European Patent Office (60.4%), the United States (59.6%) and the PCT route (59.3%) at almost the same rate, and China at 34.8%, ahead of Japan at 25.9%.
Data table: Applicant countries and their shift between cohorts
| Country | Families 2015–2024 | Share of set | 2015–2018 | 2019–2022 | Share 2015–2018 | Share 2019–2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 26,106 | 26.6% | 11,091 | 11,004 | 28.4% | 25.5% |
| Switzerland | 11,615 | 11.8% | 4,286 | 5,270 | 11.0% | 12.2% |
| Netherlands | 10,438 | 10.6% | 4,729 | 4,167 | 12.1% | 9.7% |
| France | 9,783 | 10.0% | 3,904 | 4,365 | 10.0% | 10.1% |
| United Kingdom | 9,594 | 9.8% | 3,892 | 4,175 | 10.0% | 9.7% |
| Italy | 5,920 | 6.0% | 2,295 | 2,931 | 5.9% | 6.8% |
| Turkey | 4,177 | 4.3% | 1,004 | 2,114 | 2.6% | 4.9% |
| Ireland | 2,943 | 3.0% | 802 | 1,495 | 2.1% | 3.5% |
| Sweden | 2,859 | 2.9% | 1,218 | 1,202 | 3.1% | 2.8% |
| Spain | 2,670 | 2.7% | 1,053 | 1,203 | 2.7% | 2.8% |
| Poland | 2,463 | 2.5% | 916 | 1,148 | 2.3% | 2.7% |
| Denmark | 2,267 | 2.3% | 920 | 976 | 2.4% | 2.3% |
| Belgium | 1,676 | 1.7% | 711 | 691 | 1.8% | 1.6% |
| Austria | 1,437 | 1.5% | 638 | 546 | 1.6% | 1.3% |
| Finland | 1,384 | 1.4% | 597 | 547 | 1.5% | 1.3% |
| Other 24 states, combined | 5,250 | 5.3% | — | — | — | — |
| All 39 states, distinct families | 98,136 | 102.5%* | 39,114 | 43,121 | — | — |
* The country shares add to 102.5%, not 100%: 2,446 families carry applicants in more than one of the 39 states and are counted under each. The four right-hand columns cover only the two complete cohorts and therefore exclude the 15,901 families first filed in 2023–2024 — 16.2% of the set overall, but 25.4% of Turkey's families and 22.0% of Ireland's, which is why the cohort comparison carries least weight for those two.
Data table: Filing offices reached, 2015–2022 cohort
| Office | Families reaching it | Share of the 82,235-family cohort |
|---|---|---|
| EP — European Patent Office | 49,656 | 60.4% |
| US — United States | 49,026 | 59.6% |
| WO — PCT international | 48,764 | 59.3% |
| CN — China | 28,609 | 34.8% |
| JP — Japan | 21,323 | 25.9% |
| DE — Germany | 15,199 | 18.5% |
| CA — Canada | 9,306 | 11.3% |
| ES — Spain | 8,279 | 10.1% |
| AU — Australia | 8,237 | 10.0% |
| KR — Korea | 7,235 | 8.8% |
| GB — United Kingdom | 6,705 | 8.2% |
| BR — Brazil | 5,369 | 6.5% |
Both tables count families non-exclusively. A family with applicants in two countries appears under both, which is why the country column sums to 100,582 against 98,136 distinct families — an excess of 2,446. The same holds for offices: one family usually reaches several, so the office shares add to well over 100%. The office table is restricted to the complete cohort 2015–2022 (82,235 families) because a family's full office coverage is only visible once its members have published.
What the Field Actually Contains — IPC Profile
The IPC subclasses carried by the 98,136 families, and what that reveals about the boundary of WIPO field 13.
A61B (diagnosis, surgery, identification) is carried by 45,460 of the 98,136 families, 46.3% — the field's centre of gravity. A61M (introducing media into the body) follows at 19.3% and A61F (prostheses and implants) at 16.2%. Two non-A61 subclasses reach the top ten and mark where medical technology meets software: G16H healthcare informatics in 12,000 families (12.2%) and G06T image data processing in 5,584 (5.7%). That is the same convergence the diversification section shows from the applicant side — Siemens Healthineers and Philips each placing a quarter or more of their portfolio in Computer technology.
Data table: Most frequent IPC subclasses
| IPC subclass | Title | Families | Share of 98,136 |
|---|---|---|---|
A61B | Diagnosis; surgery; identification | 45,460 | 46.3% |
A61M | Devices for introducing media into, or onto, the body | 18,934 | 19.3% |
A61F | Filters implantable into blood vessels; prostheses | 15,855 | 16.2% |
G16H | Healthcare informatics | 12,000 | 12.2% |
A61L | Methods or apparatus for sterilising materials or objects | 11,164 | 11.4% |
A61N | Electrotherapy; magnetotherapy; radiation therapy | 7,640 | 7.8% |
G06T | Image data processing or generation, in general | 5,584 | 5.7% |
A61C | Dentistry; oral or dental hygiene | 5,135 | 5.2% |
G06F | Electric digital data processing | 4,726 | 4.8% |
G01N | Investigating or analysing materials | 4,562 | 4.6% |
A61K | Preparations for medical, dental or toiletry purposes | 4,053 | 4.1% |
A61G | Transport or conveyances for patients | 3,965 | 4.0% |
A61H | Physical therapy apparatus | 3,760 | 3.8% |
A61J | Containers for medical or pharmaceutical purposes | 3,045 | 3.1% |
WIPO field 13 is a classification mapping, not a market definition. Three of the twenty-five largest groups in this set are not medical-device manufacturers, and the IPC profile shows exactly how they enter it. Of Philip Morris's 333 families in the set, 317 carry A61M and 311 carry A24F (smokers' requisites); of British American Tobacco's 324, 301 carry A61M and 316 A24F — heated-tobacco and vapour devices are classified alongside inhalers. Of L'Oréal's 374 families, 146 carry A61B, 144 A45D (hairdressing and cosmetic equipment) and 106 A61N. A reader treating this set as "the European medical-device industry" would be counting roughly a thousand families that belong to tobacco and cosmetics. Any downstream use of the ranking should either accept that boundary explicitly or narrow the scope to specific A61 subclasses.
Subclass counts are non-exclusive: a family carrying both A61B and G16H appears under each, so the column sums well above 98,136. IPC labels come from IPC edition 20260101.
Do the Leaders File Together?
Joint applications between the twenty largest groups, counted on shared applications rather than shared families.
Direct co-filing between the twenty groups is rare: six pairs, 319 family-level joint filings in total, against 23,915 families held by the groups overall. Only two pairs carry real volume, and neither is an arms-length industrial partnership. CNRS and Inserm share 208 families — two French public research organisations that routinely co-own the output of joint units. Alcon and Novartis share 97; Alcon was a Novartis division until the 2019 separation, so these are largely filings made while the two were one group, not a collaboration between competitors. Between the device manufacturers themselves, the largest link in the whole set is three families.
Data table: Joint filings between the twenty groups
| Group pair | Relationship | Joint families |
|---|---|---|
| CNRS + Inserm | Two French public research organisations | 208 |
| Alcon + Novartis | Same group until the 2019 separation | 97 |
| CNRS + Siemens Healthineers | Public research and industry | 5 |
| Inserm + Siemens Healthineers | Public research and industry | 5 |
| B. Braun + Koninklijke Philips | Two device manufacturers | 3 |
| Inserm + Roche | Public research and industry | 1 |
| All pairs | — | 319 |
Co-applicancy is measured on the application, not the family. Two groups
count as filing together only when both appear as applicants on the same
appln_id. Joining on docdb_family_id instead would also link
groups that merely happen to hold different members of one family, which is not a
collaboration. The gap is measurable: the twenty group counts exceed their distinct family
total by 453 shared memberships, but only 319 of those overlaps arise on a shared
application. Filings between different legal entities of the same consolidated
group are excluded by construction, since both sides map to one group name.
Use Case — Finding Licensees for a University Patent
How a technology-transfer office can read this data as a shortlist, and where it must not be read that way.
1 — Start from the field, not the company
Take the WIPO field the university patent falls into and list the European groups active in it. This report does that for Medical technology; the same query shape works for any of the 35 fields by changing one field number.
2 — Consolidate before you rank
A raw applicant-name ranking splits groups across legal entities. Philips is reached only by unioning two case variants and one damaged spelling; Siemens Healthineers files through three entities in two countries. Rank groups, not names.
3 — Use the adjacent fields as the entry point
The diversification table shows which second and third fields each group actually files in. A patent in Optics reaches Carl Zeiss, Karl Storz and Alcon; one in Computer technology reaches Siemens Healthineers and Philips at a quarter or more of their portfolio.
4 — Read direction, not just size
The two complete cohorts show where a group is expanding. Groups whose count rose between 2015–2018 and 2019–2022 are building in the field; the provisional years 2023–2024 are not usable for this and are excluded from every comparison here.
What this data cannot tell you. Patent counts measure filing activity, not licensing appetite, freedom to operate or commercial fit. A group with a large portfolio may be defending a position rather than looking to acquire. The field boundary is a classification mapping, so a shortlist drawn straight from the ranking will include applicants whose business is tobacco or cosmetics. And an applicant absent from this set is not absent from the technology — it may simply be domiciled outside the 39 EPO contracting states.
Summary
Five findings from the European medical-technology set, 2015–2024.
A wide field, not a concentrated one
98,136 patent families and 44,749 distinct applicant entities. The twenty largest groups hold 23,915 families — 24.4%. The largest single group, Koninklijke Philips, holds 7.6%.
Flat volume, mild growth
Complete filing years run between 9,516 and 11,599 families. The 2019–2022 cohort holds 43,121 families against 39,114 in 2015–2018, a rise of 10.2%. The 2023–2024 decline is publication lag.
Specialisation varies by a factor of a hundred
Medical technology is 98.5% of SHL Medical's portfolio and 1.0% of Robert Bosch's. Seven of the twenty groups are above 90%; seven are below 25%.
Universal overlap in twelve fields
The twenty groups touch all 35 WIPO fields, and in twelve of them every one of the twenty is present — including Measurement, Computer technology, Control and Handling.
Almost no joint filing
Six pairs of the twenty groups ever file together, 319 families in total. The two substantial links are two French public research bodies and a pre-separation corporate relationship.
The field boundary is classification, not market
Tobacco and cosmetics groups reach the top 25 through A61M and A45D. Roughly a thousand families in the set belong to businesses that are not medical-device manufacturers.
For anyone using this landscape to find partners or licensees, the operative finding is the combination of the last two cards: the overlap between groups is in the adjacent fields, not in joint filings. The twenty groups almost never file together, but twelve technology fields contain all twenty of them. Shared technical ground exists; shared patents do not.
Methodology
Search strategy, counting rules, data basis and known limitations.
This report was compiled on 15 August 2026 against
EPO PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 (patstat_2026a), with classification labels
taken from IPC edition 20260101 (in force 1 January 2026) and
CPC edition 202608 (in force 1 August 2026). Every figure in the report comes
from a query executed against that data basis; the complete SQL ships alongside the report in
queries.sql.
Update note — the search strategy in this edition was reconstructed
This edition of the report was rebuilt from scratch. It is also the first edition to ship a
queries.sql: the file that accompanied the earlier edition was empty,
so the search strategy behind that edition was never documented anywhere and could
not simply be re-run on the current data.
The strategy was therefore reconstructed from the report's own published text and
data tables — the stated use of WIPO technology fields with a weight threshold of
0.25, of doc_std_name for applicant identification, of
applt_seq_nr > 0, and of a fixed list of applicant countries. Parameters the
text did not state, above all the unit being counted, were identified by probing candidate
readings against the published figures until one reproduced them. That reconstruction is an
inference and carries residual uncertainty: it establishes what the earlier figures are
consistent with, not what was actually run.
The reconstruction was used only as a starting point. Every number in this report comes from a query written and executed for this edition, under the counting rules set out below, which differ from the reconstructed ones in three deliberate respects: families rather than applications, corporate groups rather than individual applicant names, and all 39 EPO contracting states rather than a shorter country list.
Search strategy, counting rules and data source — in detail
How the set was delimited
A DOCDB patent family belongs to this report's population when all four conditions hold:
- Technology: at least one member of the family carries WIPO technology
field 13 (Medical technology) with a weight of at least 0.25, via
tls230_appln_techn_fieldjoined totls901_techn_field_ipc. Classification is aggregated across all members of the family, not read off a single office's application. - Geography: at least one applicant record
(
applt_seq_nr > 0) on any member of the family has aperson_ctry_codeamong the 39 EPO contracting states: AL, AT, BE, BG, CH, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, LI, LT, LU, LV, MC, ME, MK, MT, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SI, SK, SM, TR. This is a definition of "Europe" chosen for being enumerable and citable; it is applicant domicile as PATSTAT records it, not the location of the research. - Rights type:
ipr_type = 'PI'— patents of invention only. Designs and utility models are excluded, which matters in this field: registered designs are common for medical devices and would otherwise enter every count. - Time: the family's earliest filing year falls in 2015–2024.
How a family is dated
- A family is assigned to the year of its earliest filing across all of its members, computed before the time window is applied, then filtered on that window. Taking the minimum only over the filings inside the window would pin families that began earlier to 2015 and inflate the first year — and the sum-equals-total check cannot detect that, because it passes under either reading.
- The annual series therefore sums exactly to the reported total: the ten years 2015–2024 add to 98,136, and the cohorts 39,114 + 43,121 + 15,901 add to the same figure.
How applicants were consolidated into groups
- The scope is built on
person_name, the name as filed.han_namewas not used to define any of the twenty groups: it fails in two directions — a harmonised group can contain a different organisation, and a clean harmonised group can still be incomplete. - Name matching is case-insensitive, which is not cosmetic here. In this
edition of PATSTAT the same entity appears under both a mixed-case and an upper-case
person record: "Koninklijke Philips N.V." and "KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS N.V." are separate
person_namevalues, as are the two spellings of Alcon, Biotronik, Coloplast, Novo Nordisk and a dozen others. A case-sensitive ranking splits every one of them. - One damaged spelling was verified and kept: "KONINKLEJKE FILIPS N.V.",
128 families, harmonised to its own
han_namegroup and therefore invisible to any search on the correct spelling. - Groups were assembled to corporate-group level, so Aesculap and B. Braun Avitum sit under B. Braun; Cilag, DePuy and Medos under Johnson & Johnson; Gambro under Baxter; Gyrus Medical under Olympus; Roche Diagnostics and Roche Diabetes Care under Roche; Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Siemens Healthineers AG and Siemens Healthineers International AG under Siemens Healthineers. Siemens AG itself is not merged into Siemens Healthineers and is reported separately.
- Applicants outside the explicit group mapping keep their
han_nameas a fallback key, so the entity count of 44,749 is a count of harmonised keys, not of hand-checked corporate groups. All twenty groups in the ranking are explicitly mapped; none of them rests on the fallback. - Applicant country is not group domicile. The country column in the ranking is the country PATSTAT records most often for that group's applicant records — CH for Johnson & Johnson, because the group files through Cilag GmbH International in Switzerland, and DE for Olympus, which files through Olympus Winter & Ibe in Hamburg. The separate "parent domicile" column is a manual attribution from public corporate information and is the only column in the report not taken from a query.
Why the classification checks for code-set landscapes do not apply here
- The scope of this report does not come from a hand-built IPC or CPC code list. It comes
from the maintained WIPO 35-field concordance shipped with PATSTAT
(
tls901_techn_field_ipc), which WIPO keeps aligned with the IPC. - Consequently the three code-set completion steps — expanding a subtree, unioning reclassification predecessors, keeping retired symbols — have no referent here and were not applied. Claiming them would be false; silently omitting them would hide that the check was considered. The concordance itself carries whatever subtree and lifecycle handling WIPO applies, and this report inherits it.
- The IPC and CPC editions are still named above, because the IPC subclass labels in the
technology-profile section are drawn from
patstat-mtc.classification.dpt_ipcat those editions.
Non-exclusive counts
- Patent families can be assigned to several WIPO technology fields, several IPC subclasses and several applicant countries. Every breakdown in this report is therefore non-exclusive and its sub-totals exceed the distinct family total: the 39 country counts sum to 100,582 against 98,136 distinct families; the 35 field counts sum far above the 93,333-family group portfolio; the IPC subclass counts likewise.
- For this reason no pie or doughnut chart appears in the report. Every breakdown is a bar chart, and every chart has a data table carrying the same values.
Data source
- EPO PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 edition, dataset
patstat-mtc.patstat_2026a, on Google BigQuery, reached through mtc.berlin'spatstat-mcpserver. - Classification labels from
patstat-mtc.classification.dpt_ipc, IPC edition 20260101 / CPC edition 202608. - Six billed queries were executed for this report. All aggregation happens server-side; no result set was post-processed by hand beyond arithmetic on the returned figures (shares, period changes), which is reproducible from the tables shown.
Scope Limitations
- Designs and utility models are excluded (
ipr_type = 'PI'). In medical technology registered designs are common, so this is a material exclusion and not boilerplate. - "Europe" means applicant domicile in one of the 39 EPO contracting states. A European-invented patent filed by a non-European parent entity is out of scope; a European filing entity of an overseas group is in scope, which is why Johnson & Johnson, Olympus and Baxter appear in the ranking.
- The field boundary is the WIPO concordance, not the medical-device market. Roughly a thousand families in the set belong to tobacco and cosmetics groups, entering through A61M, A24F and A45D. The IPC-profile section quantifies this.
- 2023 and 2024 are provisional. The ~18-month publication delay means these two filing years are incomplete in the Spring 2026 edition. No period comparison in the report ends inside them, and the annual chart marks them.
- Group consolidation covers the top of the distribution only. Twenty groups were mapped explicitly; the remaining 44,729 applicant keys are harmonised names that may still split or merge entities. The count of applicant entities should be read as an order of magnitude, not an exact census.
- No external plausibility comparison was made. No public source counts medical-technology patents on the same definition — WIPO field 13, family-level classification, applicant domicile in the EPO contracting states, family earliest filing year — so a published figure would not have been comparable. The check rests instead on internal consistency: the annual series sums exactly to the total, the cohort splits sum exactly to the total, and the twenty group counts reconcile with their distinct total to a stated excess of 453 shared memberships.
- Grant rates are not reported and no grant-rate claim is made, so the usual pendency caveat does not arise.
Glossary — patent terms explained
- DOCDB patent family
- A group of applications covering the same invention in different countries, linked by identical priority claims. Counting families rather than applications stops one internationally filed invention from counting many times.
- Application vs. family
- One family usually contains several applications, one per office. This report's set holds 98,136 families and 370,837 applications — an average of 3.8 applications per family.
- WIPO 35 technology fields
- A standard concordance mapping IPC codes onto 35 broad fields in five sectors, maintained by WIPO for cross-industry comparison. Field 13 is Medical technology.
- Weight (in
tls230) - A family's IPC codes rarely fall in one field. PATSTAT distributes each application across the fields its codes touch, with weights that sum to 1. A threshold of 0.25 keeps assignments that carry real mass and drops incidental ones.
- Applicant vs. inventor
applt_seq_nr > 0marks the party that owns and files the application;invt_seq_nr > 0marks the natural persons who made the invention. This report counts applicants only.person_name,doc_std_name,han_name- Three renderings of the same applicant: the name as filed, a document-level standardisation, and a harmonised entity name. This report scopes on the first and uses the third only as a fallback key for entities outside the top twenty.
ipr_type- The kind of right applied for.
PIis a patent of invention; other values cover utility models and registered designs, which this report excludes. - Non-exclusive breakdown
- A breakdown in which one family can appear in several rows. Sub-totals then exceed the distinct total, and the rows cannot be read as shares of a whole.
- PATSTAT edition
- PATSTAT is published twice a year. Figures move between editions, most of all for the two most recent filing years, so the edition is named wherever a number is quoted.
- EPO contracting states
- The 39 states party to the European Patent Convention. Used here as an enumerable definition of "Europe" for applicant domicile.
Report Files
The report ships with queries.sql, containing every SQL statement behind the
figures, with the PATSTAT and classification editions recorded in its header, the reconstructed
strategy documented as such, and each query annotated with the section it feeds. Re-running the
file against the same edition reproduces the numbers exactly; re-running it against a later
edition will not, and that is why the edition is named.
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This report was built with a fully reproducible pipeline: EPO PATSTAT Global on BigQuery, a custom MCP server, and Claude AI for analysis and visualization.