The leading assignee in this dataset holds 221 of the 2,577 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked company at 70. Even so, the top 5 assignees combined account for only 22.2% of all records, so no single company controls a majority of the filed art. The remaining share is spread across a long tail of the other ranked companies plus smaller filers, which means a freedom-to-operate review needs to look well beyond the top names.

Filing peaked at 214 records in 2018 and has declined since, falling from 137 records in 2021 to 60 in 2024 — a 56% drop over that three-year span. That decline is measured on complete data through 2024; counts for 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent years will rise as more records publish. Treat the 2024 figure, not the raw 2025-2026 numbers, as the most reliable recent read.

The search corpus covers both methods together along with the shared process controls — wet film thickness, drying kinetics, gas quenching and pinhole density — that determine whether either coating method is repeatable at production scale. Rather than one method being clearly more contested, the claim density sits in these shared process-control parameters, meaning risk assessment should focus on specific thickness, drying and quenching windows rather than on the coating method label alone. Recent filings such as the 2026 CEA patent claim specific molar ratio windows layered onto a gas-sweep step, illustrating how narrow the differentiating claim elements tend to be.