Activity in this dataset is spread across established coatings and specialty chemical manufacturers rather than concentrated in a single dominant holder. Several large multinational coatings companies and Chinese domestic manufacturers appear among the tracked assignees, but recent-year momentum data shows many of them recording zero filings in the latest year, with year-on-year declines as steep as -100% among some holders. That pattern suggests the field is more fragmented and more recently quiet than a single-leader narrative would imply, so any competitive read should look at co-assignee pairs and filing venue alongside raw counts.

The dataset shows filings rising from 64 in 2017 to a peak of 75 in 2022, then falling toward 13 in the most recent partial year. Part of that recent drop is a publication-lag artefact — patent applications typically publish around 18 months after filing, so the last one to two years in any trend chart are always undercounted. Even correcting for that lag, the multi-year direction since the 2022 peak reads as a genuine slowdown rather than continued growth, which is consistent with a maturing claim space rather than an emerging one.

C09D (coatings, paints and inks) is essentially the entire dataset at 978 of 989 records, confirming that formulation claims here are filed almost exclusively under the coatings classification rather than being scattered across adjacent polymer or process codes. Secondary activity sits in C08F (addition polymers), C08G (condensation polymers) and C08L (polymer compositions), each covering well under a quarter of the records, with coating processes (B05D) and additive use (C08K) further back still. A formulator scoping prior art should treat C09D as mandatory and the polymer-chemistry codes as a secondary check depending on the specific binder system.

China is the dominant filing venue by a wide margin, accounting for 551 of the 989 families in this dataset compared with 93 at the EPO, 90 in the US, 55 via the PCT route, 45 in Canada and 32 in Japan. That skew reflects both the size of China's domestic coatings manufacturing base and the volume of utility-model-style filings common there. A company building a global filing strategy in this space needs a CNIPA filing as a baseline, not an afterthought, alongside whichever other jurisdictions match its manufacturing and sales footprint.

EP4389829A1 claims an aqueous transparent tinting base at pH 10.0-12.5 built from a polymeric organic binder, rheology modifiers, alkali metal siliconate, filler, dispersing agent and wetting agent, explicitly excluding titanium dioxide, plus a colored variant that adds pigment to an aqueous polymer dispersion binder. The specificity of that pH range and the titanium-dioxide exclusion narrows what it actually blocks: formulations outside that pH band, or ones that do include titanium dioxide as an opacifier, likely sit outside its claim scope. Anyone formulating a tinting base should check the exact pH range and binder chemistry against their own formulation rather than assuming the filing covers all aqueous tinting systems broadly.