By Li Panpan
China’s technology giant Huawei announced its latest key inventions as part of its biennial “Top Ten Inventions Awards” ceremony held at its Shenzhen headquarters on June 8.
This year’s Top Ten Inventions include an adder neural network that significantly reduces power consumption and circuit area to a game-changing “optical iris” that provides a unique identifier for optical fibers.
It was the third innovation and IP-themed event Huawei has hosted with a forum on its innovation practices. The information released from the forum gives a latest update on Huawei’s achievements in R&D and patents.
By 2021, Huawei held more than 110,000 active patents across over 45,000 patent families. It has more granted patents than any other Chinese company. It has filed the most patent applications with the EU Patent Office and ranked fifth in terms of new patents granted in the United States.
For five straight years, Huawei has ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of Patent Cooperation Treaty applications. Tian Lipu, President of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property's China Chapter, said, “Huawei is constantly changing itself and showcasing to the world the value of IP from China.”
Alan Fan, Head of Huawei’s IPR Department, said the value of Huawei patents has seen wide recognition in the industry, especially in mainstream standards such as cellular technology, Wi-Fi, and audio/video codecs.
“In the past five years, Huawei’s 4G/5G patents have been licensed to more than two billion smartphones. And about eight million connected vehicles with Huawei patents have been delivered to the consumers every year,” Fan said.
Huawei is also actively working with patent license administration companies to offer “one-stop” licenses for mainstream standards.
“Over 260 companies, accounting for one billion devices, have obtained Huawei’s HEVC patent licenses through a patent pool,” Fan said. He added that the company is in discussions to establish a new patent pool to give the industry “quick access” to Huawei’s patents for Wi-Fi devices worldwide.
Huawei is also discussing joint licensing programs for 5G patents with licensing experts and other leading industry patentees.
Manuel Desantes, former Vice President of European Patent Office, said that, given the vast number of changes in the world these days, what matters most is no longer the number of registered patents or inventions. “The IP system should assure that the creations that merit protection are those that bring actual value,” he added.
Currently, Huawei invests over 10% of its sales revenue into R&D. It ranked second in the 2021 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard in R&D expenditure.
In 2021, the company increased its R&D investment to RMB142.7 billion ($21.21 billion), representing 22.4% of its total revenue. Over the past decade, Huawei’s total R&D investment surpassed RMB845 billion($125.59 billion).
