Infosys, India’s second largest IT services company leads in the number of patents filed by large Indian IT services companies. The data compiled by equity research firm Barclays, the company filed 159 patents in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during the last five years which is the highest by any Indian IT services company during that period.
Globally, the only IT services company which has been able to beat Infosys in the patent race is Accenture who filed 345 patents during the period. In India, Infosys was followed by TCS which filed 43 patents and Wipro with eight. HCL Technologies filed the least number of patents among the Indian top-4 at four which were filed only in the ongoing year, the report said.
Since patent filings are often done in different jurisdictions, it makes it difficult to compare one company against the other. For the sake of uniformity, Barclays Research compiled the patents filed in the USPTO, details of which are in the public domain. “This also becomes pertinent because the largest client concentration for the Indian majors is in the US,” the report said.
According to Barclays, Infosys had filed a total of 354 patents in different jurisdictions during the last five years out of which 82 have been granted so far. In 2012, the company had a total of 474 patents were waiting for approval in different patent jurisdictions.
Infosys is one of the few Indian IT services companies who spend heavily on R&D. During the last three years, the company’s spend on R&D as a percentage of its revenues as remained at 2.1 per cent which is the best in the industry.
With the company focusing on product and platform business for the growth driver in the future, the focus on R&D is only expected to increase going forward.
