Offshore Installation Vessel Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
Offshore Installation Vessel and Method Patents
39.0% of all 648 records sit with just five assignees, and 60.6% with ten — a field concentrated at the top with a long tail below rank ten. Annual filings rose from 71 in 2017 to a peak of 84 in 2022, then fell to 18 by 2024 — a 71% drop across the 2021-2024 span. Treat 2025 and 2026 as incomplete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent two years will fill in as later publications are indexed and should not yet be read as a further decline.
- 1SUBSEA 7 LTD66
- 2ITREC BV57
- 3SUBSEA 7 DO BRASIL SERVICOS LTDA49
- 4ACERGY FRANCE43
- 5SUBSEA 7 NORWAY AS38
See the full offshore installation vessels and methods 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 on offshore installation vessel patents
Who holds the most patents on offshore installation vessels?
One assignee leads the ranked list with 66 records, well ahead of the fifth-placed company at 38 and tenth place at 24. The top five assignees combined hold 39.0% of all 648 records in scope, and the top ten hold 60.6%, meaning over half the field’s patenting activity concentrates in a small group of companies while the remaining 77-company ranked list holds the rest in a long tail. This concentration is typical of capital-intensive vessel hardware, where only a handful of firms operate the physical assets the patents protect.
Is offshore installation vessel patenting still growing?
Filings peaked at 84 in 2022 after rising from 71 in 2017, then dropped 71% from 62 in 2021 to 18 in 2024. However, publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in this dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as confirmation of a continued decline. A fair read is that activity cooled after 2022 but the true 2025-2026 trend will not be clear until those years finish publishing.
What technology areas overlap most with installation vessel claims?
Marine vessel classifications (B63B) appear on 33.3% of the 648 records, wind turbine classes (F03D) on 26.5%, drilling classes (E21B) on 25.6% and crane/hoist classes (B66C) on 23.8%. Because a single patent can carry multiple IPC codes, these figures overlap rather than sum to a whole, and they show that installation claims rarely stay confined to vessel hardware — most also reach into the turbine, foundation or lifting equipment being installed.
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 Offshore Installation Vessels and Methods 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.