Society

Basic stance and policy

Aisin positions intellectual property as a vital management resource for sustainable growth and corporate value. We promote its maintenance, enhancement, and appropriate use based on our management and business strategies. Through unique value propositions we aim to secure a competitive advantage and accelerate the expansion of our business.

Promotion Structure

Aisin's functional departments dedicated to R&D and intellectual property (IP) collaborate to formulate IP strategies, promote the invention and discovery of IP assets, protect property rights, employ assets, manage maintenance, and implement management initiatives for assuring the sound management and defense of IP. Liaison personnel are assigned to development functional departments to deepen this collaboration.
Furthermore, collaboration with global R&D offices is being strengthened. Additionally, employee education programs are held to emphasize the importance of intellectual property and provide training related to operating the business.

Strategy

By inventorying our intellectual property and analyzing IP-related events and other trends in the external environment we are strengthening our managerial and business strategies. We devise new core technologies that align with our strategy to build an optimal IP portfolio. Furthermore, by leveraging IP across domains, we maximize the value of our business activities and enhance corporate value.
We also demonstrate our respect for third-party IP rights by conducting clearance investigations, ensuring business safety and strengthening our negotiating power.

We aim to maintain a state where new elemental technologies continue to accumulate for the future. We will promote continuous growth, using the number of inventions—which represent the creation of advanced technological concepts—as an indicator. This will enable us to strategically secure patent rights for inventions to ensure competitive advantage while differentiating our technologies through confidentiality.

Related materiality issues

Number of inventions: Total number of patent applications along with confidential and publicly disclosed instances of intellectual property

Key initiatives

Initiatives for amassing new elemental technologies

Based on management and business strategies, we set development themes aimed at strengthening IP while promoting strategic invention and discovery. More specifically, as we incorporate our strongest technologies into our development roadmaps, we use data analysis to identify such topics as changes in the external environment that could affect our IP assets. Depending on the business model, we select open or closed development domains or exclusive domains protected by intellectual property rights under which to pursue inventions. Thus, we aim to strengthen our IP through targeted invention, creation, and discovery. In recent years, we have focused on promoting invention and creation in areas such as mobility information processing technologies that contribute to enhanced safety and comfort and, in the energy domain, hydrogen-related technologies. We are optimizing our IP portfolio along both technological and international regional axes.

Number of information analysis inventions

Number of hydrogen-related inventions

IP management and utilization initiatives

We continuously monitor the use of our IP and the value it generates. By applying our future vision to this data, we promote the maintenance, management, and use of IP. Furthermore, by feeding the results of these initiatives back into our strategic IP activities, we enhance our overall IP platform. We currently maintain and manage a diverse range of IP across such mobility segments as brakes, steering systems, drivetrains, vehicle systems, driving assistance control, and LBS and also in the energy and living environment domains.

FY2025 patent portfolio