Rare Earth Elements
Patent Technology Landscape

The headline finding is compositional, not volumetric. Total filing activity has been flat since 2016, but within it China gains 6.8 percentage points of share at the expense of the national routes of Japan, the United States and Korea, recycling doubles its share of annual filings from its 2016 trough, and academic filing grows while corporate filing declines. The field is not expanding; it is being redistributed.

The series has two regimes. Between 2014 and 2016 the landscape grew by 73.9%, from 1,940 to 3,373 families. From 2016 onwards it has been flat: every year since sits between 2,860 and 3,395 families, and the 2022 peak of 3,395 exceeds the 2016 level by less than one per cent. Measured across the last complete stretch, 2014 to 2022, the field grew 75.0%, a compound annual rate of 7.3% — but essentially all of that growth was booked in the first two years.

No growth rate is quoted through 2023 or 2024, because both years are still incomplete.

The share comparison is drawn on complete filing years only — 2014–2018 against 2019–2022 — because a family first filed in 2023 or 2024 has not yet completed its international filing programme, and including those years would credit the home office with a shift that is really a publication lag.

On that basis the shift is real but narrower than the raw counts suggest. CNIPA appears in 77.1% of families first filed in 2014–2018 and 83.9% of those first filed in 2019–2022, a gain of 6.8 percentage points. What China gains is taken almost entirely from the national routes: Japan falls 3.3 points to 18.7%, the United States 2.8 points to 19.2%, Taiwan 0.9 to 3.7%, Korea 0.8 to 11.8% and Germany 1.0 to 2.0%.

European and international protection hold their ground: the EPO share is unchanged at 13.4% in both periods, and the PCT route edges up from 18.5% to 19.3%. The redistribution is between national filing routes, not away from multilateral ones.

Two sub-areas move in opposite directions across the period. Extraction and refining metallurgy (C22B) grows from 264 families in 2014 to 473 in 2022, a rise of 79.2%, slightly ahead of the 75.0% recorded by the landscape as a whole over the same span. Luminescent materials (C09K) peak at 1,105 families in 2018 and fall to 822 by 2022, a decline of 25.6% from the peak, consistent with a maturing phosphor field.

Magnets (H01F) are the most stable large block, moving within a band of 468 to 663 families a year across the whole period with no clear direction.

The applicant ranking does not mirror the geography. China accounts for 82% of the filings, yet the two largest applicant groups are Japanese steelmakers: Nippon Steel with 646 families and JFE Steel with 534. That is consistent with the shape of the classification breakdown, where the single largest place in the landscape is C22C38/005 — ferrous alloys containing rare earths — with 6,691 families.

The Chinese side of the ranking is led by academic and state research institutions: Jiangxi University of Science and Technology (346), Northeastern University (241), Central South University (232) and the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths (227), with Baotou Iron and Steel at 320 the largest corporate name among them. The twenty groups together account for 5,088 family mentions, at most 15.4% of the landscape — the count is non-exclusive, since a co-filed family counts for each partner, so the true share is lower still. A field in which the twenty largest filers hold under a sixth of the volume is a dispersed one.

Of the eleven applicants above the reporting threshold, ten are Japanese and one is German. No applicant recorded in the United States, the Republic of Korea, France or the United Kingdom reaches the threshold of 85 families, even though the USPTO receives 5,748 families and KIPO 3,535 — those filings are dispersed across many applicants rather than concentrated in a few portfolios.

The Japanese presence spans the whole value chain: steel and alloys (Nippon Steel, JFE Steel), magnets and electronic components (TDK, Toshiba), phosphors and lighting (Nichia, Denka), silicon and specialty chemicals (Shin-Etsu) and end-use manufacturing (Toyota, Panasonic). Osram Opto Semiconductors is the single European name in this group, in the phosphor and LED domain.

Recycling is the clearest growth story in an otherwise flat landscape. Recycling and recovery filings rise from 250 families in 2014 to 690 in 2022, an increase of 176.0% and a compound annual rate of 13.5% — against 75.0% and 7.3% for the landscape as a whole over the same span. Their share of annual filings roughly doubles, from 12.9% in 2014 and a trough of 10.2% in 2016 to 20.3% in 2022, holding near 19% in the two provisional years.

Across the whole period, 4,654 of 32,931 families (14.1%) carry a recycling or recovery classification.

Read together with the applicant ranking, the picture is of a field organised around vertically integrated groups rather than around consortia. Every one of the four largest fully resolvable pairs joins two entities of the same group — a parent and its materials subsidiary, or two successive corporate names of the same filer. Cross-organisational collaboration exists, but not at a scale that changes the shape of the landscape.

Across the whole period companies hold 16,921 of the 32,931 families (51.4%) and universities 10,582 (32.1%): roughly one family in three carries a university applicant. The direction of travel is as notable as the level: on a per-year basis, university filings rise 22.9% between the two periods while corporate filings fall 13.6%. Public research organisations are flat at about 155 families a year, and the university-affiliated research bodies grow 35.2%, from 93 to 125 a year.

Individual inventors fall from 164 to 62 families a year, a decline of 61.9%.

20,402 of the 32,931 families (61.9%) have been cited at least once, and the landscape has attracted 89,510 citing-family links in total, an average of 2.72 per family. On the completed part of the period — families first filed in 2014–2019 — the cited share rises to 79.2% (13,356 of 16,862). 2,111 families (6.4%) have been cited by ten or more families.

The declining bars are a measurement artefact, not a finding: a family first filed in 2024 has had almost no time to be cited. Only the left-hand side of this chart carries information about impact.

Data basis. All figures in this report were computed on 15 August 2026 against EPO PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 (patstat-mtc.patstat_2026a), with classification metadata from IPC edition 20260101 (in force 1 January 2026) and CPC edition 202608 (in force 1 August 2026). The classification code set was completed in three ways before any family was counted: every code was expanded to its full subtree, retired symbols were added by a prefix pass bounded to inactive codes, and predecessor symbols were unioned in from the reclassification chain. No code list was filtered on is_active, so deprecated symbols that still sit on documents remain in scope.