Study On The Patent Technology Competitiveness Of Key Steel Enterprises In China

At present, China's iron and steel industry is faced with such issues, for example while low level capacity is excess, high-end products still need a large number of imports, ultimately it is because China's steel enterprises are lack of technological innovation capability. In the future, in addition to adjust the structure when facing the market, through improving innovation ability to enhance competition is also a important choice for China's steel enterprises, while accurately grasping the basic pattern and competition position of the steel enterprises' technological competitiveness is the basis and prerequisite to analyze the reasons of influencing the technological competitiveness and explore improvements of the technological competitiveness. Patent document is one of the most effective carriers of technical information, and it has many advantages, such as easy access and unified format, so it is an important information resource for studying on enterprises' technological competitiveness, the patent technology competitiveness of iron and steel enterprises is one of the important contents of their technological competitiveness, we can analyze and evaluate the technological competitiveness of enterprises by in-depth excavation of patent documents.Firstly, the concept, method and procedure of patent analysis are introduced. Secondly, the patents of 73 key iron and steel companies in China are retrieved from Derwent Innovation Index(DII) and sixteen key steel enterprises of them are regarded as our research object. Each of the sixteen enterprises applied more than 300 patents from 1985 to 2013. Number of patent applications per year, patent impact, citation network of patentees, highly cited patents and IPC classification number are used to investigate the competitiveness in technology of sixteen steel companies, the analysis of distribution structure of Derwent Manual Codes is used to identify research and development focus in China's patented iron and steel technology in recent years. Thirdly, thirteen world's top 500 steel enterprises are regarded as our other research object, we compared the technological competitiveness gap between domestic and foreign steel companies and their R&D focus by the same method as described above.Through analysis on the patents of the sixteen key iron and steel enterprises in China, we found that Baosteel, Anshan Iron and Steel Group, and Wuhan Iron and Steel Group were strong in patent technology competitiveness, alloy steel, control or testing methods and low carbon technology were identified as research and development focus in China's patented iron and steel technology from 2011 to 2013. Through analysis on the patents of thirteen world's top 500 steel enterprises, we found that the patent technology competitiveness of domestic iron and steel magnates such as Baosteel and Anshan Iron and Steel Group were weaker than foreign iron and steel magnates. The results can be used to clear their patented technology for enterprise competitive position and determine the direction of future technology development.