When you search for an organisation in Cipher, results are grouped to show all patents assigned to all entities including:
Subsidiaries
Acquired companies
Merged companies
Companies corrected for erroneous entries in the patent registry
Cipher groups to the ultimate parent, the ‘organisation’, and uses proprietary software (correcting mistakes), software tools (suggesting similarly named companies for a human to then decide), outsourced manual checking, in-house manual checking and corporate organisation data to group organisations and entities, providing users with the best possible view of what patent assets an organisation owns.
In addition, Cipher also tracks pure patent transactions (companies buying or selling patents) via the USPTO.
If we take Porsche as an example:
You can see that Porsche are grouped as a stand-alone entity, with a tag saying part of VW. Below that is VW and by clicking the red triangle you will see Porsche (and Audi, etc) nested under VW.
This allows you to search and add Porsche’s portfolio either as a stand-alone entity (just Porsche’s assets), or you may decide to add Volkswagen’s portfolio as a whole, to include Porsche, Volkswagen AG, Audi and others depending on the analysis you wish to carry out using Cipher.
The portfolio is added to the report via the 'tick' shown in the report creation page below. The red arrow on the left is used to expand out the organisation to show all portfolios. To add only ‘Porsche’ owned assets to the report, select either of the ticks outlined in blue below. To add ‘Porsche’ owned assets in addition to all those owned by parent company ‘Volkswagen Group’, select the tick outlined in red below:
Corporate Grouping/Organisation Ownership
Corporate grouping is regularly maintained here at Cipher, and to ensure organisational structures are accurate we enforce the following rules in terms of ownership:
Subsidiaries - Cipher will only group subsidiaries/acquisitions under an organisation if the parent has more than 50% ownership.
Joint Ventures - often companies jointly create a new venture with a separate company, in which each has a 50% stake for example. These will not be grouped under either parent, but will stand alone as a separate organisation.
Divestments - will be split out of the former owner and merged with the new owner (or left as standalone groupings - keeping in mind the 50% ownership rule)
What if I notice that a change is required to Organisation Grouping in Cipher i.e. an organisation has been acquired by another?
One important aspect of the Cipher grouping is that in addition to 1790 Analytics data and our other corrections, our clients can tell us if assignees need to be grouped under different owners and this is corrected in the system for everyone.
To do so directly from the Cipher platform, select the feedback button in the top right of your Cipher dashboard:
Suggested articles:
Need help? Request support and we'll connect you with a Cipher expert.
Can't wait? Contact us on 02039099222 or email support@cipher.ai