This Patent Landscape Report on Graphite and its Applications was prepared following a related request from Sri Lanka. This publication was prepared under the stewardship of Marco Alemán (Assistant Director General, IP and Innovation Ecosystems Sector), under the direction of Alejandro Roca Campañá (Senior Director, Technology and Innovation Support Division) and Andrew Czajkowski (Director, Technology and Innovation Support Division), with the generous financial support by Funds-In-Trust Japan Industrial Property Global provided by the Japan Patent Office. The report was prepared by a project team initially led by Irene Kitsara (IP Information Officer, Technology and Innovation Support Division) and then by Lakshmi Supriya (Patent Analytics Officer, Technology and Innovation Support Division), members from the patent analytics team of IPOS International comprising Alfred Yip (Director, Patent Search, Examination and Analytics), Huang Jinquan (Head, Patent Analytics), Sun Ting (Senior Analyst) and Pan Shanshan (Analyst), Björn Jürgens (Consultant), Craig Dsouza (Young Expert Professional, Technology and Innovation Support Division).
Conclusion:
The wide range of graphite applications has stemmed from an intensive research and development effort worldwide. Patent filings for graphite-related technologies have originated from over 60 countries across every region. However, although this suggests graphite innovation is global, it is actually the case that graphite-related patent families originate predominantly from just a few countries. Specifically, the top five applicant origins are China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the United States and the Russian Federation. Together, they account for the vast majority (95 percent) of global patenting output. China is dominant among the top five applicant origins, responsible for four in every five graphite patent families filed worldwide in the last decade. It is most active in the exploitation of flake graphite, being home to the world’s second-largest reserve of natural graphite and the primary supplier of flake graphite to the global market. Artificial graphite, on the other hand, is a wellexplored alternative to natural graphite, especially in countries without a rich natural reserve, such the Republic of Korea. Battery applications were the key driver of graphite technologies, accounting for 10–15 percent of global graphite production. Among all graphite uses and products, graphite for battery applications is the one that has attracted the most intensive patent filing, with over 8,000 patent applications filed from 2012 to 2021. Such a high level of patenting activity is expected to continue, as the global effort to fight climate change intensifies. In particular, the explosive market growth of EVs and large-scale energy storage will demand more graphite innovations; for example, novel graphite-based anode solutions with greater energy density and better performance. The two other application areas that recorded intense patent activity were ceramics and heat dissipation. Ceramic applications have remained an active patenting field, attributable to their indispensable role in refractory applications. In addition, novel graphite-filled ceramic materials and composites have been explored for a broad range of uses, including in automotive and power machinery applications. Graphite for heat dissipation is one of the few areas where the rest of the world has shown a comparable patenting output to China, with substantial contributions coming from Japan, the Republic of Korea, the United States and Taiwan Province of China. As the level of power dissipation has increased owing to a continual performance improvement in electronics, research has shifted toward novel graphite-based compositions and microstructures for better heat dissipation performance.
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