Huawei touts IP openness and protection as crucial to innovation

Details: John Tanner; Category: Vendors; 13 November 2025; 11580 views

Huawei gathered experts in innovation and intellectual property rights (IPR) in Beijing on Tuesday to discuss and promote the importance of IPR in driving innovation, the need to balance openness in IP licencing with vigorous IP protection, and Huawei’s role in both.

At its 6th Innovation and IP Forum, Huawei’s chief legal officer Song Liuping said the company – as both a patent licensor and licensee – is committed to an open approach to innovation in terms of open standards and open source. At the same time, he added, sustaining that innovation depends on respecting and protecting IP.

“We are moving fast towards a fully connected, intelligent world. Both connectivity and computing will be more important than ever, so we are protecting and rewarding new innovation,” Song said in his opening address. “We are committed to building an environment that protects innovation and IP, and work closely with industry partners to promote constructive IP protection.”

Song also emphasised the point that Huawei “respects the IP of others, and protects its own, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.”

Huawei said it currently holds over 150,000 patents worldwide, which it shares through open-source software, open hardware, patent filings, standard contributions and academic papers. It has also signed or renewed cross-licencing agreements with big-name players like Nokia, Ericsson, Amazon, Samsung and Sharp.

Marco Alemán, assistant director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said in a video address at the forum that that Huawei had 6,600 published patent cooperation treaty (PCT) applications in 2024, “and has been the top user of the PCT system since 2014.”

Alan Fan, VP and head of Huawei’s Intellectual Property Rights department, said that while the company’s patent licensing revenue in 2024 was around US$630 million, it has actually spent almost three times that amount on patent royalties to other IP holders as part of its R&D activities.

Meanwhile, its patent pool continues to grow, with 37,000 new patents published in 2024, a new record for the company. Huawei said over 2.7 billion 5G devices have been licensed under its patents as of the end of 2024, along with 1.2 billion consumer electronic devices in the Wi-Fi domain and 3.2 billion multimedia devices under the company's video codec patents.

Meanwhile, Wang Ningling, president-elect of the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), acknowledged the challenging international trade environment in which the IPR discussion is taking place, which makes an open, collaborative and responsible approach to patent licencing even more essential to innovation.

“In today's challenging world with severe geopolitical tensions, LESI and LESI China will continue to uphold the belief that innovation is without borders, and effective global intellectual property management will promote the common development of mankind,” she said in her keynote address. “I encourage industry leaders, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs, to foster collaboration, share knowledge generously and practice responsible licensing by building bridges rather than walls.”

Huawei’s Song added in his address, “No matter what changes come our way, we will remain committed to openness, collaboration and innovation.”

Meanwhile, Huawei also announced new updates to its Chaspark Patent site, which was launched in June last year to help researchers around the world to search for patent information. The new updates include semantic search, accurate long text matching, and AI-powered summaries and related patent recommendations.