Cold Forging Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Cold Forging and Net Shape Forming Patents: Filing Trends and Leading Assignees
20.3% concentration at the top. The five leading assignees hold 384 of the 1,895 records in scope — a real lead, but nowhere near a lock on the field. Filings peaked at 44 in 2017. The clean comparison — 2021's 23 records against 2024's 17 — shows a -26% move over three years, the most recent span not distorted by publication lag.
- 1NIPPON STEEL CORPORATION5.4%
- 2NSK LTD5.0%
- 3KOBE STEEL LTD3.7%
- 4NTN CORP3.3%
- 5SUMITOMO METAL IND LTD2.8%
See the full cold forging and net shape forming analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about cold forging patents
Who holds the most patents in cold forging and net shape forming?
The leading assignee in this dataset holds 103 of the 1,895 records in scope, with the field dropping off to 54 records by fifth place and 36 by tenth. Together the top five hold 20.3% of all records and the top ten hold 31.5%, which means a clear leader exists but the majority of filings sit with a long tail of smaller filers. Any competitive review should look past the top names to that tail, since it accounts for most of the field.
Is cold forging patent activity growing or shrinking?
Filings peaked in 2017 at 44 records and the clean year-on-year comparison, 2021 to 2024, shows a -26% change. Because patent publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, the most recent one or two years in any chart will understate real activity, so it is too early to call the trend a sustained decline. The safest reading is that filing has cooled from its 2017 high, not that it is currently collapsing.
What technology areas get the most patent claims in this field?
Alloy composition (IPC class C22C) appears in 33.1% of the 1,895 records and heat treatment of metals (C21D) in 22.4%, both ahead of the core forging-process classes B21K (17.1%) and B21J (11.6%). This indicates that the densest claim activity concerns what the metal is and how it is treated rather than the forging equipment or die design itself. A record can belong to more than one class, so these percentages are not mutually exclusive.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Cold Forging and Net Shape Forming covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.