At its 6th Innovation & IP Forum in Beijing, Huawei brought together technology leaders, global standards organisations, IP bodies including WIPO, and research partners to explore how openness, intellectual property and shared innovation models will shape the next phase of global networks.
Huawei executives outlined how the company’s commitment to core R&D of next generation AI, computing and networking technology is complemented by its commitment to patent licensing ecosystems, open standards and open source software programmes.
Patent positions
Central to Huawei’s enablement of innovation commercialisation is a huge R&D engine – the company committed 20% of revenues to R&D in 2024, and has always spent at least 10% of revenues on R&D.
That has driven a large and rapidly growing patent portfolio that gives Huawei intellectual property rights across a wide range of tech industry sectors.
Alan Fan, Head of the Intellectual Property Rights Department at Huawei, on stage at IP Innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) Forum.
Alan Fan, Vice President and Head of Huawei’s Intellectual Property Rights Department, noted that the company develops and shares technology through open-source software, open hardware, patent filings, standards contributions and academic research — a multi-channel approach designed to strengthen the wider ecosystem, not just its own roadmap.
Huawei holds more than 150,000 active patents worldwide, publishing 37,000 patents in 2024, its highest ever. Those patents are also spread geographically across three main jurisdictions, with over 50,000 valid patents registered in China, 29,000 granted patents in the United States and more than 19,000 granted patents in Europe.
That spread is also reflected in its revenues. Huawei said it earned around $630 million in patent licensing revenue in 2024, split roughly one-third each between Asia-Pacific, the US and Europe. The patent royalties that Huawei has paid over the years are nearly three times the amount of royalties it has received.
Marco Alemán, Assistant Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), noted, “Huawei is a leading global user of WIPO’s Global IP Services and a strong driver of innovation. Huawei had 6,600 published Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications in 2024 and has been the top user of the PCT system since 2014.”
The company also submitted more than 10,000 technical contributions to standards organisations, and published over 1,000 academic papers in 2024.
At the Forum, the company also revealed its “Top Ten Inventions” award for 2025, highlighting breakthroughs in AI, computing, data storage, and next-generation user experience, as well as inventions in computing technology such as its Scale-up Ultra-Large-Scale SuperPoD Computing Platform.
Open innovation
While Huawei is famously a force for research-led innovation, one noticeable aspect of the Forum was the company’s clear desire to position itself within open innovation ecosystems, so that its own innovations can be applied within a shared and global context.
That includes its contributions to open-source ecosystems like openEuler, an open source OS for digital infrastructure, and OpenHarmony, its distributed open OS. By the end of 2024, openEuler has accumulated 1,956 community partners and over 21,000 developers covering 150 countries and regions. The number of devices powered by OpenHarmony rose to over 1 billion so far, with source code submissions from Huawei and over 8,100 community contributors.
Huawei also has opened up its UnifiedBus – an interconnect protocol for its SuperPoDs, in the hopes that industry partners will adopt this protocol to develop more UnifiedBus-based products and components, and jointly create an open UnifiedBus ecosystem.
Another open ecosystem enabler is the Chaspark Patent platform, which provides free access to over 200 million patent documents, giving researchers and others access to knowledge and the tools to leverage that innovation.
Liuping Song, Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer.
This open commitment was reinforced by the company’s Chief Legal Officer, Liuping Song
“Open innovation drives society and technology forward, and it’s in our DNA. We are committed to an open approach to innovation,” he said.
“The company’s overall strategy towards open source is about active participation and support. We join a lot of open source organisations and we also open source our system to those ecosystems,” he added.
For Huawei, IP protection within open source contexts is a question of protecting the ecosystem, while leaving code open to all.
“When it comes to open source, the code is open to everyone else, and the purpose of applying for patents in an open source context is to protect the entire open source ecosystem. Everyone can contribute techniques, technologies, code and tools to the community, and a contributor applies for a certain patent to protect an entire ecosystem. So if someone else outside the ecosystem wants to replicate the code, they can still do so, but they’re not able to replicate the entire ecosystem, given the existing protection through the patent,” Song said.
Maintaining telecoms interoperability
In mobile network infrastructure, Huawei is committed to the same cross-licensing regime as all vendors – whereby Standard Essential Patents are declared by companies who then receive and pay royalties accordingly.
By the end of 2024, in the cellular standard field, more than 2.7 billion 5G devices have been licensed under Huawei’s patents. In the Wi-Fi domain, over 1.2 billion consumer electronic devices have been licensed under Huawei’s patents. And in multimedia, more than 3.2 billion multimedia devices have been licensed under the company’s video codec patent.
In communications networks and systems, no single vendor, research institution or standards body can define the next generation of networks alone, particularly as AI, cloud and advanced radio technologies begin to overlap.
Liuping Song said that Interoperability depends on vendors contributing their strongest ideas into global standards bodies, where technical merit and consensus determine what becomes part of the industry baseline.
“Standards only succeed when everyone contributes openly and plays by the same rules. That’s how individual inventions become shared progress,” he said.
Once technologies are adopted into standards, companies license their essential patents on FRAND terms. This ensures that innovation can move through the ecosystem without barriers that slow deployment or restrict participation.
From that point, competition resumes. Vendors differentiate not by owning the shared blueprint but by excelling in how they implement it: through engineering, power efficiency, software intelligence, product design and time-to-market. Collaboration provides the foundation; competition propels the market forward.
The impact of AI
One area that will be interesting to follow is how technology patents related to AI are declared and implemented within AI-native communications networks infrastructure.
Huawei highlighted how advances in mathematical techniques and smarter algorithms can deliver significant performance gains long before hardware enters the picture. Rather than treating compute as a race measured in silicon alone, the company emphasised that the next uplift will come from the combination of better maths, better software and better system-level design.
That is also reflected in a different approach to patent logic. While 5G is about SEPs and the obligations of licensing as stipulated by standards setting, that doesn’t apply so much to AI patents.
Alan Fan said, “With AI there is not a standard for any particular industry – various industries are still discussing or exploring the patentability and the strategy concerning AI patents. Huawei has invested heavily in AI, and therefore we have come up with some patented AI technologies, but we follow the logic of product-related patents instead of standards-related patent logic.”
“The purpose of applying for our AI patents is to protect our AI related ecosystems and related algorithms so that we can open up those patents for all partners to use.”
Huawei’s creation of patent search tools is also intended to facilitate AI patents within research, to protect AI related ecosystems and algorithms to open up patents for all its partners to use.
Openness as the engine of innovation
Throughout the event, Huawei’s intention was clear. By leaning into openness across standards contributions, licensing practices, open-source work and wider collaboration, the company aims to reinforce the shared infrastructure on which the next generation of networks will be built.
Huawei is positioning itself not just as a supplier, but as a major contributor to the frameworks shaping the future of connectivity.
The conversations in Beijing highlighted one consistent view: the networks of the future will depend on technologies that are open, interoperable and shaped collectively. And the organisations investing in that shared groundwork now will have an outsized influence on what comes next.
For Huawei, that appears to be as much a strategic commitment as a technical one.
* This is a sponsored feature article written by TMN staff
