Toyo Tyre Patents – Insights & Stats (Updated 2026)

Toyo Tire has a total of 10,440 patents globally, out of which 6,547 have been granted. Of these 10,440 patents, 66.02% patents are active. Japan is where Toyo Tire has filed the maximum number of patents, followed by the United States of America and China. Parallelly, Japan seems to be the main focused R&D centre and is also the origin country of Toyo Tire.

Toyo Tire Corporation was established on 1 August 1945 and is headquartered in Itami, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. It makes passenger car, SUV, light truck and truck and bus tires under the Toyo Tires and Nitto brands, with product lines such as Open Country and Proxes, and it still runs a smaller automotive parts business built around anti-vibration rubber. Tires make up the majority of group sales, and North America was its biggest region in the first quarter of 2026. Until January 2019 the company traded as Toyo Tire & Rubber Co., Ltd. and the years around that name change mark the clearest turning point in its patent record.

Do read about some of the most notable patents of Toyo Tire covered in this article. You can also explore Toyo Tire’s patent portfolio, worldwide patent filing activity, patent filing trends over the years, and many other statistics related to its patent portfolio.

How many patents does Toyo Tire have?

Toyo Tire has a total of 10,440 patents globally. These patents belong to 7,410 unique patent families. Out of 10,440 patents, 6,893 patents are active.

How many patents did Toyo Tire file every year?

Toyo Tire patent filing trend, 2006–2026

Are you wondering why there is a drop in patent filing for the last two years? It is because a patent application can take up to 18 months to get published. Certainly, it doesn’t suggest a decrease in the patent filing.

The sharper break comes earlier, in 2019. Most of that fall is in filings made outside Japan, which appear in far smaller numbers from 2019 onward. Japanese filings, which make up the bulk of the portfolio, declined more gradually, and that trend is covered in the next section.

Toyo Tire’s 2017–2019 restructuring and its impact on patent filings

Between 2015 and 2019, Toyo Tire went from a broad rubber-products company to a business centred on tires. In 2015, the company admitted that performance data for its seismic isolation rubber had been falsified, and its chairman and president both resigned. Toyo then divested its chemical industrial products and rigid polyurethane foam businesses in December 2017 (keeping seismic isolation rubber for construction), sold its flexible urethane foam business in December 2018, and became Toyo Tire Corporation in January 2019. The company said the new name reflected its focus on mobility.

Toyo Tire patent applications filed in Japan, 2012–2024

• 2012–2018
• 2019–2024

Japan is the best place to see the effect, because it is where Toyo files first and where most of its portfolio sits. Within the 2012–2024 period shown, Japanese applications peaked at 398 in 2017. From 2019 they settled into a narrow band of 244 to 279 a year, with no sign of a rebound through 2024.

The average fell from 363 applications a year in 2014–2018 to 256 a year in 2019–2024, a decline of about 30%. The drop lines up with the sale of the chemical industrial products and urethane foam businesses. Inventions for those product lines were previously filed under the Toyo name, so a lower filing rate is what you would expect once they left the group.

The timing alone does not prove that the divestitures caused the whole decline. Toyo also overhauled its management after 2015, and that may have changed how much it chose to patent. What the numbers do show is that the lower filing rate has held for six years, which makes it a lasting feature of the portfolio rather than a one-year dip.

Also, 2025 and 2026 figures are incomplete because of patent publication delays, so they are left out of this comparison.

How many Toyo Tire patents are alive or dead?

Toyo Tire patent portfolio by legal status

• Active, granted4,305
• Active, pending application2,588
• Inactive, granted (protection lost)2,242
• Inactive, application (never granted)1,305

Toyo Tire patent portfolio: how much protection has been lost?

Of the 10,440 patent records analysed, 3,547 (34.0%) are inactive. They fall into two groups that mean very different things. 2,242 records (21.5% of the portfolio) are granted patents that are no longer in force, which is 34.2% of all 6,547 granted patents. The other 1,305 records are applications that became inactive without reaching grant.

Within those 1,305 applications, 304 are international PCT filings. A PCT application always ends once it moves into national phases, so these records reflect a procedural step rather than a lost right. That leaves roughly 1,001 national or regional applications that were withdrawn, abandoned or refused before grant.

The records do not show why each right ended, so non-payment, withdrawal, rejection and expiry cannot be separated. The 6,893 active records should also not be read as 6,893 enforceable patents: 2,588 of them are pending applications that have not been granted yet.

This is where proactive patent monitoring becomes critical. GreyB’s Elixir platform helps IP teams track patent legal-status changes, maintenance-fee events, prosecution developments, and other critical patent activities in real time. By monitoring these events, teams can identify important changes earlier, investigate potential deadline risks, and make more informed decisions about their patent portfolios.

Where has Toyo Tire lost the most patent protection?

Inactive records by country

• Granted patent no longer in force
• Application inactive before grant

Japan holds the largest absolute number of inactive records (2,001), but only 28.4% of Japanese records are inactive. The pattern abroad is different. 57.1% of US records and 64.4% of German records are inactive, and in Germany more applications ended before grant (129) than granted patents lapsed (117). The median application year is 2013 for Japan, the US and Germany alike, so portfolio age does not explain the gap.

China stands out at the other end, with only 9.0% of its 989 records inactive. Its records are only slightly newer (median application year 2015), which suggests Toyo is maintaining Chinese rights more consistently. These shares identify jurisdictions worth a closer look, but they do not on their own prove a higher lapse rate without checking each family’s full legal history.

Which active Toyo Tire patents expire next?

Active granted patents by estimated expiry year

• Expiring 2026–2030
• Expiring 2031–2032

Of the 4,305 granted patents that are still active, about 609 are estimated to expire between 2026 and 2030, with a further 350 in 2031 and 2032. Most of these protect inventions first filed during the 2006–2012 period. Expiry dates here are estimates based on the standard 20-year term, so individual patents can end earlier if renewal fees are not paid, or later where a term extension applies.

How many patents did Toyo Tire file in different countries?

Toyo Tire worldwide patent filing (top 12 jurisdictions)

Countries in which Toyo Tire filed patents

Japan accounts for 67.6% of all records. The United States (11.6%) and China (9.5%) follow, and Germany sits fourth with 382 records. WIPO and the European Patent Office are filing routes rather than countries, so their records feed into national or regional rights rather than standing on their own.

Where are the research centres of Toyo Tire patents located?

R&D centres of Toyo Tire, by inventor country (patent families)

Toyo Tire’s research is almost entirely Japanese: 7,290 of its 7,410 patent families (98.4%) originate in Japan. The United States is a distant second with 52 families, followed by China with 40 and Thailand with 8.

10 best Toyo Tire patents

US2010200131A1 is the most popular patent in the Toyo Tire portfolio. It has received 85 citations so far. It covers a non-pneumatic tire and its manufacturing method, and two more of Toyo’s airless tire filings, US2010132865A1 and US8113253B2, also appear in the top 10.

Five of the ten are US design patents for tread patterns, which tend to be cited heavily by later design filings. The list also includes US2009093202A1, a method for making semiconductor polishing pads, a product area outside Toyo’s tire business.

Below is the list of 10 most cited patents of Toyo Tire:

What percentage of Toyo Tire US patent applications were granted?

Toyo Tire has filed 861 patent applications at the USPTO so far (excluding design and PCT applications). Out of these, 539 have been granted, leading to a grant rate of 62.60%.

Below are the key stats of Toyo Tire patent prosecution at the USPTO.

Measured only against applications that reached a final outcome (539 granted and 314 not), the rate is 63.19%. Of the 539 US grants, 297 are still in force.

Who are the top inventors behind Toyo Tire patents?

Takeshi Fukuda is the most prolific inventor in the portfolio, named on 284 patent records. The ten inventors listed here are each named on more than 130 records.

What are Toyo Tire’s key innovation segments?

Toyo Tire’s patents can be grouped into innovation segments based on the technology each invention protects. The three views below cover which technologies the portfolio protects, the countries where Toyo protects each of them, and how its research focus has shifted over the years. These detailed segment insights are being prepared and will be unlocked soon.

What technologies are covered by Toyo Tire?

The chart below distributes patents filed by Toyo Tire in different countries on the basis of the technology protected in patents. It also represents the markets where Toyo Tire thinks it’s important to protect particular technology inventions.

R&D focus: how has Toyo Tire’s research focus changed over the years?

EXCLUSIVE INSIGHTS COMING SOON!