The dataset ranks 100 companies, and one assignee leads with 65 of the 481 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked company at 27. The top five assignees together hold 42.2% of all records, and the top ten hold 55.7%. This is a concentrated field: a handful of integrated steelmakers, several with decades of reheating-furnace operating history, account for the majority of documented approaches, while the remaining ranked companies each hold comparatively few filings.

Based on the last span that can be treated as complete, filing fell 43% from 2021 to 2024, following a peak of 36 filings in 2019. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in the dataset are still filling in and should not be read as confirmation of a continued decline. The honest read is that activity has cooled from its 2019 peak, with the most recent years too incomplete to characterise further.

US6945776B2, assigned to POSCO and published in 2005, covers a skid member with a ventilation channel that restrains heat transfer to a lower support pipe, reducing the temperature difference between the skid-contact region and the rest of a heated slab or billet. It is one of the most-cited records in this landscape’s technical lineage. Anyone designing a skid support or cooling-pipe arrangement for a walking beam or reheating furnace needs to check this claim scope specifically around the ventilation-channel mechanism, not just the general skid-mark problem.