The twenty largest groups hold 24.4% of European medical-technology patent families; Philips alone holds 7.6%.

The twenty rows add up to 24,368 while 23,915 distinct families are involved: 453 families held by more than one group are counted under each. The change column compares the complete cohorts 2015–2018 and 2019–2022 and leaves out the provisional years. Parent domicile is a manual attribution from public corporate information, not a PATSTAT field; every other column comes from a query.

These shares do not add to 100%. A family carries a WIPO field whenever any member holds it with a weight of at least 0.25, and most families carry several. Roche's 41.7% pharmaceuticals, 38.6% biotechnology and 18.1% medical technology overlap heavily. "Total portfolio" counts each family once, across all fields.

Field totals are non-exclusive and add to far more than 93,333, because a family carrying several fields at weight ≥ 0.25 appears under each. Compare fields with one another; do not partition the portfolio. "Groups present" counts a group once per field, however many families it holds there.

Turkey's and Ireland's trajectories are the 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. The cohort columns leave out these 15,901 families, so the comparison carries least weight for those two.

Both breakdowns are non-exclusive. A family with applicants in two countries appears under both, so the country column sums to 100,582 against 98,136 distinct families, an excess of 2,446. One family usually reaches several offices, so the office shares add to well over 100%.

WIPO field 13 is a classification mapping. It is not a market definition. Three of the twenty-five largest groups are not medical-device manufacturers. Of Philip Morris's 333 families, 317 carry A61M and 311 A24F (smokers' requisites); of British American Tobacco's 324, 301 carry A61M and 316 A24F: heated-tobacco and vapour devices sit alongside inhalers. Of L'Oréal's 374 families, 146 carry A61B, 144 A45D (hairdressing and cosmetic equipment) and 106 A61N. Roughly a thousand families belong to tobacco and cosmetics. Accept that boundary explicitly or narrow the scope to specific A61 subclasses.

Co-applicancy is measured on the application. Two groups count as filing together only when both appear on the same appln_id; a join on docdb_family_id would also link groups that hold different members of one family. The twenty group counts exceed their distinct total by 453 shared memberships, but only 319 of those arise on a shared application. Filings between legal entities of the same consolidated group are excluded by construction.

What this data cannot tell you: patent counts measure filing activity. They do not measure licensing appetite, freedom to operate or commercial fit. A group with a large portfolio may be defending a position and not 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. An applicant absent from this set may still be active in the technology; it may be domiciled outside the 39 EPO contracting states.

This edition was rebuilt from scratch and is the first to ship a queries.sql. The file that accompanied the earlier edition was empty, so the earlier search strategy was never documented. It was reconstructed from the earlier report's own text and tables (WIPO fields at weight 0.25, doc_std_name, applt_seq_nr > 0, a fixed country list), probing unstated parameters against the published figures. That reconstruction is an inference and was used only as a starting point. Every number in this report comes from a query written for this edition, which counts families instead of applications, corporate groups instead of single names, and all 39 EPO contracting states.