The dataset ranks 82 assignees, and ownership is highly concentrated: the leading company alone holds 158 of the 570 records in scope, and the top five combined account for 84.4% of all records. This level of concentration is unusual and suggests a small number of long-established manufacturers built and defended broad claim portfolios over decades rather than a fragmented, actively competitive field. Anyone entering this space should expect to negotiate around, or design around, a small number of dominant portfolios rather than many scattered small holders.

Filing has shrunk sharply in the most recent complete years: from 54 records in 2021 to just 2 in 2024, a 96% decline. The overall trend peaked earlier, in 2019, at 66 records. Because patent publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the very last one or two years in any dataset will always look artificially low, but the 2021-2024 decline is based on years clean enough to compare directly, and it points to a genuinely narrowing filing pipeline rather than a data artefact.

The overwhelming majority, 95.4% of the 570 records in scope, fall under IPC class B26B, hand-held cutting tools, covering blade and cutting-head mechanics. Smaller shares extend into cosmetics use (2.6%), medicinal preparations (2.5%) and hairdressing and toilet equipment (1.8%), with even thinner overlaps into kitchen utensils, mechanical vibration generation, textile finishing and grinding tools, each under 1%. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares add up to more than 100%, and they are all measured against the same 570-record base.