Within this landscape’s six-company ranking, one assignee leads with 12 records, well ahead of the fifth-ranked company’s 2. That is a steep drop-off rather than an even spread, meaning most of the process-specific claim space documented here is held by a single filer rather than distributed across many active companies. Anyone entering this space should review that leader’s portfolio first, since it covers the largest share of the ranked filings.

Filings dropped from 3 in 2021 to 1 in 2024, a 67% decline over that span, after peaking at 8 records in 2020. That said, publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 numbers in this dataset are still incomplete and cannot yet be read as confirming a continued slowdown. The safest read is that activity cooled from its 2020 peak through the last complete year, 2024.

B29C, the shaping-of-plastics classification, appears in 48.0% of the 25 records in scope and remains the technical core covering scarf and patch repair processes. Robotics (B25J, 24.0%) and control systems (G05B, 20.0%) are the next most common classes, indicating that a meaningful share of recent claim activity is about automating and instrumenting the repair rather than changing the underlying materials chemistry. Digital data processing (G06F) and dimensional/structural measurement (G01B, G01M) classes appear less often but reinforce the same automation and inspection trend.