IBM was awarded the most patents in 2018, but overall grants declined by 3.5 percent

We may have passed the peak of the “patent war” in the mobile industry, but the concept of patents as power is far from disappearing, since they continue to be a strong marker for how a company is breaking new ground in technology, and do sometimes help to safeguard an inventor’s or company’s original work — even if the legal enforcement around patents sometimes gets abused.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/ibm-was-awarded-the-most-patents-in-2018-but-overall-grants-declined-by-3-5-percent/