Top 2004 US patent recipients

Let's see, 4 US corporations, 5 Japanese and 1 Korean. It looks like just over half of these patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies. Of course, you might argue that the most valuable intellectual property tends to be in patents filed by small startups (like Google a few years ago), where the US may have a comfortable lead.

1 3,248 IBM
2 1,934 Matsushita Electric Industrial Co
3 1,805 Canon Kabushiki Kaisha
4 1,775 Hewlett-Packard
5 1,760 Micron Technology
6 1,604 Samsung Electronics
7 1,601 Intel Corporation
8 1,514 Hitachi
9 1,310 Toshiba Corporation
10 1,305 Sony Corporation