Samsung Electronics has overtaken IBM as the holder of the most US patents as of the start of this year, data showed.

The South Korean tech firm held 75,596 US patents, outdoing No. 2 IBM by nearly 1.6 times, as of Jan. 1, according to the top 100 list drawn up jointly by the journal IAM and intellectual property big data analysis company ktMINE. 

IBM, which had ranked top for the past 25 years, held 46,443 patents.

Another South Korean tech firm, LG Electronics, was at seventh place with 28,235.