At Huawei’s recent “Broadening the Innovation Landscape 2022” forum in Shenzhen, the company announced new inventions as part of its biennial “Top Ten Inventions” Awards, shared the company’s progress in IP, and discussed the broader value of IP licensing and innovation.
Speaking at the event, Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer, Song Liuping, said: “Protecting IP is key to protecting innovation. We are eager to license our patents and technologies to share our innovations with the world. This will help broaden the innovation landscape, drive our industry forward, and advance technology for everyone.
The inventions announced at the forum could lead to the development of new product lines, become important commercial features of existing products, or generate significant value for the company and the industry.
The Dual-Active Network Attached Storage is one of these inventions. This discovery is the driving force behind the world’s first symmetric active-active high-end storage architecture with zero service interruption. It meets the demands for high-end storage performance, reliability, and scalability all at once. Our architecture outperforms the industry and can be used in a variety of industries, including transportation, energy, and finance.
The LinkTurbo and Hyperhold device acceleration bundle. With this invention, our smartphones can provide a smooth user experience under all network and memory usage conditions. LinkTurbo significantly increases the concurrent download rate and reduces game delays and video buffering time, whereas Hyperhold significantly increases available memory and improves basic read-write performance.
The Iris on Fiber Optics invention marks optical iris on fibers, akin to a QR code for each connection. This innovation helps carriers accelerate fiber broadband deployment, reduces resource accumulation by 30%, and reduces operational costs by 20%.
The Massive MIMO In-N-Out invention addresses the major challenges for indoor and outdoor 5G deployment. In outdoor scenarios, BladeAAUs help customers simplify 5G network deployment and ensure optimal 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G network performance. While indoors, Distributed MIMO greatly improves 5G network capacity and user experience.
The announcement came in the context of intellectual property rights, the protection and sharing of which Huawei believes is critical to the tech ecosystem.
Continuous R&D investments have made Huawei one of the world’s largest patent holders. The company is willing to license its patents and technologies worldwide to drive progress in the industry.
By the end of 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, 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.
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, more than two billion smartphones have been licensed to Huawei’s 4G/5G patents. And for cars, about eight million connected vehicles licensed to Huawei patents are being delivered to the consumers every year,” Fan said.
Huawei is also working actively with patent license administration companies in offering “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.
Liu Hua, Director of World Intellectual Property Organization Office in China, praised Huawei’s sustained focus on innovation, saying: “We look forward to seeing Huawei continue to take part in high-level global competition with innovation at its core.”
For Manuel Desantes, former Vice President of European Patent Office, 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 said.
This marked the third innovation and IP-themed event Huawei has hosted on its innovation practices. Every year, Huawei invests over 10% of its sales revenue into R&D.
In terms of R&D expenditure, Huawei ranked second in the 2021 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. In 2021, the company increased its R&D investment to CNY142.7 billion, representing 22.4% of our total revenue. Over the past decade, Huawei’s total R&D investment surpassed CNY845 billion.
