Founder Ren Zhengfei urges Huawei to step up patent licensing as telecoms giant seeks to remake itself amid US sanctions
- Ren said royalty charges ‘should not be too low’ as that could have the effect of curbing innovation and the willingness to invest in R&D
- Huawei held a total of 110,000 active patents across 45,000 patent families by the end of last year
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co is stepping up efforts to turn its vast pool of patents into revenue via “reasonable pricing”, founder Ren Zhengfei said in an internal meeting, as the company continues a drive to diversify its sales mix while still subject to crippling US sanctions.
“Previously our intellectual property [efforts] were made for self-defence and to keep our own business safe,” Ren told the company’s IP team in an internal meeting in March, with an internal memo documenting the meeting posted on Huawei’s employee forum last week.
“[However] after years of accumulation … we need to set up a reasonable pricing benchmark for industries to use our patented technologies fairly, and generate an appropriate return on our research and development,” Ren told his employees, stressing the company’s edge in 5G mobile network patents and other technologies.
Ren noted that royalty charges “should not be too low” as that could have the effect of curbing innovation and the willingness to invest in R&D within society, and he also warned the company to prepare for a “protracted battle” to make patent licensing a success for Huawei.
Huawei held a total of 110,000 active patents across 45,000 patent families by the end of last year, and in 2021 alone the company ranked number one for the number of granted patents in both China and Europe, according to the company’s annual results filing.
Ren urged the company to update its IP strategies and bring out the “commercial value” of these confidential technology results by licensing them to external partners.