According to The Patent Board’s latest Patent Scorecard for the heavy industrial equipment industry, which was published on 21 January in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Data Centre, press manufacturer Koenig & Bauer ranks seventh among the top 50 and has thus moved up a place since the last Scorecard was issued in May 2008. 

While the table is headed by leading global players such as Caterpillar (no. 1) and Deers & Co (no. 2) from the USA and Komatsu from Japan (no. 4), KBA ranks well ahead of other German press manufacturers and is the highest placed European operation behind Swiss lift manufacturer Schindler (no. 5), which however is very much bigger.

Founded in 1968 as a patent analytics and research institution, US patent consultancy The Patent Board regularly tracks seventeen industries on a global basis according to the number of patents awarded in the USA, the application of scientific knowledge, the speed at which patents are transformed into new products and the business value of patent assets. The individual companies are also assessed according to their technological strength and the intensity of their research activities.