Follow the cells, and you eventually have to follow the cathode — the part that holds the lithium and most of the cost. A year of cathode grants is a rough map of who is spending real money to control that component, and the 2020 map has two clear regions.The first is the materials specialists. Hitachi Metals' US10749176B2 claims a cathode active material, its production method, and the resulting cell. Sumitomo Osaka Cement's US10818923B2 covers a cathode material for a lithium-ion secondary battery. Samsung SDI's US10790504B2 describes a composite cathode and how to make it. These are companies whose business is selling the powder, and their patents protect the recipe.The second region is the integrators — carmakers protecting their own cell formulations. BMW's US10727472B2 is the standout: it claims the cathode in its pre-first-charge state, which is a detail only a company that controls its own cell formation process would bother to fence off. When an automaker patents at the powder-and-formation level, it is signaling that cells are strategic, not a commodity to be bought.The off-take implication is about leverage. A carmaker that holds cathode IP has a stronger negotiating position with cell suppliers and a credible threat to bring more of the cell in-house. A pure-play materials supplier with strong cathode IP has pricing power as long as the recipe stays ahead of commoditization.What the assignee map cannot tell you is volume. A patent is a claim, not a shipment, and a single grant from a carmaker does not mean it is making its own cathodes at scale. The map shows intent and capability, not output — for output you would go to the 10-K, not the patent office.Still, the pattern is the durable signal: in 2020, cathode IP was concentrated among Japanese and Korean materials houses with a few Western automakers buying into the game. That concentration is the backdrop for every supply-agreement story that followed, and it is why the cathode keeps showing up at the center of battery economics.