[Patent Talk] Huawei Ranks No. 1 in Global 5G Patents Despite the US-China Trade War

IPlytics, a German patent data analytics firm, announced in its report "Who Leads the 5G Patent Race" that Huawei holds the most fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication patents in the world. According to the report, the global 5G patent share ranking was Huawei (15.93%), LG Electronics (10.79%), Samsung Electronics (10.55%), Qualcomm (10.44%) and Nokia (9.74%).

The US-China trade war sent Huawei's smartphone market share plummeting, but Huawei still holds the world's largest share in telecommunications equipment. The industry attributes Huawei's top position in telecom equipment to its technological capabilities and price competitiveness. In Korea, given the image of China, many still think that Chinese companies compete on price rather than technology, but it is now time to abandon this preconception.

Having filed a total of 9,739 patent applications this year, Huawei was named the "world's most innovative tech company" for the second consecutive year by Capital on Tap, a UK business credit card company. Indeed, even while operating in emergency management mode due to the US trade dispute, Huawei spent KRW 23.4586 trillion on research and development (R&D) in 2020, about 15.9% of its revenue. Considering that Samsung Electronics' R&D spending in 2020 was KRW 21.2 trillion, one can gauge how large this amount is.

As the scale of its R&D shows, Huawei's patent strategy is already considered to be among the global top tier. US semiconductor pressure brought Huawei to the brink of withdrawing from the smartphone business, yet early this year it played its 5G standard-essential patents as a bargaining chip against Samsung and Apple. This clearly demonstrates the importance of patents in an era of competition for technological supremacy. LG Electronics, too, although it has completely withdrawn from the smartphone business...