The winners from the 2014 patent wars are announced – and they’re winners for investors, too.
The world’s top 10 companies that scored patents in 2014, which also traded on a major U.S. exchange, aren’t just innovation winners, but stock winners, too. Shares of the group of biggest patent winners, named by patent tracker IFI Claims Patent Services, gained 13.3% on average in 2014. That tops the 11.4% increase by the Standard & Poor’s 500.
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) was the biggest winner on the stock front among the patent winners. The company ranked 10th among the U.S.-traded stocks in terms of the number of patents, says IFI Claims. But its stock performance, a gain of 43% last year, made it tops among the innovators.
But don’t think that lots of patents automatically translates into lots of cash for investors. Four of the top 10 patent grabbers lost ground on the stock market last year, including International Business Machines (IBM), Canon (CAJ), Google (GOOGL) and General Electric (GE). IBM, for instance, dropped 14.5% in 2014 despite being No. 1 on the list of the companies with the most patents.
BIGGEST WINNERS OF PATENTS AMONG U.S. LISTED STOCKS
| Company | Symbol | Patent rank (among US traded) | 2014 % Ch. |
| Int’l Bus. Machines | IBM | 1 | -14.5% |
| Canon | CAJ | 2 | -1.1% |
| Sony | SNE | 3 | 18.4% |
| Microsoft | MSFT | 4 | 24.2% |
| Qualcomm | QCOM | 5 | 0.1% |
| GOOGL | 6 | -5.3% | |
| Apple | AAPL | 7 | 37.7% |
| General Electric | GE | 8 | -9.8% |
| Intel | INTC | 9 | 39.8% |
| Hewlett-Packard | HPQ | 10 | 43.4% |
Sources: IFI Claims Patent Services, S&P Capital IQ, USA TODAY research
Source: usatoday.com
