Philips patents 100,000 devices

Philips has reached the milestone of 100,000 patents.

The company generates significant revenues through its pro-active intellectual property strategy. The income from intellectual property is essential for the discovery of technology and the development of new products, as it is used almost entirely to help fund research and development.

Some examples of patented Philips-inventions are CD, DVD, JPEG, MPEG (digital video), Xenon car lights, UHP lights for projectors and GSM speech codification.

Over the last five years, Philips has tripled the annual number of inventions for which it seeks patents from 1000 to 3000.

Annually, Philips selects about 3000 inventions, out of more than 8000 proposed ideas, for patent applications. Most of these inventions will normally translate into more than one patent each, as applications are filed in various jurisdictions.

Some 20,000 inventions underlie the 100,000 patents. In addition to its patents, Philips is also the owner of 22,000 brands, 11,000 model rights and 2000 domain names.