Last updated: July 2021
Calculation of the Market Coverage for Pending Patent Applications
Calculation of the Market Coverage for EP and PCT Applications
Market Coverage
The Market Coverage is calculated on patent family level and indicates the size of the global market in which the patent family is protected.
The Market Coverage is measured as the size of the markets in which a patent family is protected as benchmarked against the world's largest national market – the USA. In this context, the gross national income (GNI) of a country is used as a proxy for the relative size of each national market.
E.g., a patent family that only has an active granted member in the USA and no active pending or active granted members in any other authority has a Market Coverage of 1. Thus, a Market Coverage of 2 means that the protected market is, in total, twice as large as the US-market alone.
Calculation of the Market Coverage for Pending Patent Applications
The Market Coverage is calculated for all markets in which a patent family is protected – according to our definition, this includes both active granted members and active pending members of a patent family.
For pending patent applications we use the same general approach as for granted patents. However, we apply a discount factor of 0.7 (70% equals the worldwide average probability of pending application to become a granted patent).
E.g., a patent family that only has an active pending member in the USA and no active pending or active granted members in any other authority has a Market Coverage of 0.7 ( = 1 x 0.7).
Calculation of the Market Coverage for EP and PCT Applications
When calculating the Market Coverage for EP and PCT applications, we consider all possible authorities in which an EP or a PCT application can be validated or nationalized in.
EP Applications
The market size for a pending EP application is calculated based on the aggregated GNI (gross national income) of all EPO member authorities (38 authorities as of July 2021). Here, too, the GNI of the USA serves as a proxy. The resulting value is then multiplied by the discount factor of 0.7 (70%), which is applied to all pending patent applications, to obtain the Market Coverage.
The current Market Coverage of a patent family that only has a pending EP application and no other active documents is 0.67 (as of July 2021).
|
Note: Once an EP application has been granted, the legal status of the EP document is set to “inactive” ("nationalized") while documents related to the validated authorities are set to “active”. With that, the Market Coverage of EP application is replaced by the Market Coverage of the validated authorities. |
PCT Applications
The market size for a pending PCT application is calculated based on the aggregated GNI (gross national income) of all PCT contracting authorities (153 authorities as of July 2021). Here, too, the GNI of the USA serves as a proxy. The resulting value is then multiplied by the discount 0.7 (70%), which is applied to all pending patent applications, to obtain the Market Coverage.
The current Market Coverage of a patent family that only has a pending PCT application and no other active documents is 2.8 (as of July 2021).
|
Note: For many PCT applications the entrance into national phase results in a sudden drop in Market Coverage as visualized in the chart below.
|
