美國半導體產業關鍵專利與公司財務績效

Abstract

本篇文章主要在探討美國上市櫃半導體產業公司擁有關鍵專利與其財務績效之間的關聯性。在半導體產業中各公司無不重視技術的研發與商業化，本文先從incoPat資料庫搜尋並下載USPTO上之專利，再透過專利引用網絡中專利之SPNP(Search Path Node Pair)值計算出衡量專利重要性的Z分數(Z-Score)並探討其對公司財務表現的影響。研究結果發現Z分數(Z-Score)對公司的資產報酬率(ROA)以及現金流量(Cash Flow)有正向且顯著的影響，將公司依技術生命週期進行分群後的結果也顯示關鍵專利會影響公司的財務績效，故本研究之結果證明進行技術研發與創新在半導體產業中的重要性。

Trace back to neoclassical belief, total factor productivities beneath firms` invisible core competence would be crucial to long-run progress. This dissertation goes further to test whether the better-quality patented technologies would beneficial to firms` operational profitability and routine trading scales. On the one hand, the developed networked approached in this research present a way of quality measure to firms` accumulated patents. Secondly, the hand-collected dataset consist of both firm-level patent information and financial performance. The results in this research show that patents revealing better quality would impact favorably to firms` profitabilities and trading scales. This result aligned with finance literature would suggest the undeletable role played by firms` innovation investment; though not shown in just the short-term payoffs.