Recently Starke Management Councel Daniel Albrecht took part in the Huawei IPR conference with the title RESPECTING IP, DRIVING INNOVATIONS. It was their sixth Innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) Forum. He was able to participate online twice in recent years, but this year was his first opportunity to do so in person.
Daniel have been following Huawei's activities for several years, as the company has been one of the largest applicants at the European Patent Office for many years, filing very high-quality patents in a wide variety of fields. Furthermore, Huawei is classified as a friend of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Huawei is a Chinese technology company that provides information and communications technology infrastructure and is a major manufacturer of smart devices, including smartphones, laptops, and wearables. Founded in 1987, the company has expanded globally to become the world's largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer and a key player in areas like 5G technology. Huawei's business is divided into carrier networks, enterprise solutions, and consumer products.
As IP lawyers we find a company's innovations and patents particularly interesting. These figures are truly exceptional, which is why I'd like to examine them in more detail. It is noteworthy that Huawei has always invested more than 10% of its annual revenue in R&D. In the past four years, the investment has reached even 20%. In 2024, the total R&D spending reached CNY179.7 billion, representing 20.8% of their total revenue. Their total R&D investment over the last decade has now exceeded CNY1.249 trillion. Huawei is the 6th largest company for R&D expenditure for eight consecutive years, according to the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. Since applying for its first Chinese patent in 1995, Huawei has continuously expanded its patent portfolios in major countries and regions, including China, the United States, and Europe. Huawei applied for its first U.S. patent in 1999 and its first European patent in 2001. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Huawei has tied with the major vendors in the industry on the number of patent applications. Since 2004, Huawei has been granted the same number of patents as the industry-leading US companies. In 2008, Huawei's patent applications published under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) reached 1,737, ranking first all over the world for the first time. Huawei holds more than 150,000 active patents worldwide. As of now, Huawei has the largest number of granted patents in China, with over 50,000 valid patents. Huawei also has more than 29,000 granted patents in the United States and more than 19,000 granted patents in Europe. In the past three years, Huawei has signed or renewed cross-licensing agreements with major international vendors such as Nokia, Ericsson, Amazon, Samsung, and Sharp. Huawei had 6,600 published Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications in 2024 and has been the top user of the PCT system since 2014. Besides this Huawei has been committed to unifying global standards and working with industry peers to opening up, co-developing, and sharing these standards. Huawei submitted more than 10,000 technical contributions to standard setting organizations in 2024 at home and abroad, with an accumulated total of over 140,000.
In this context, Huawei is a good example of how the Chinese IP landscape has changed in recent years. Today, China is highly innovative. This also means that more and more top Chinese companies are investing in secure and practical IP protection.
As an IP lawyer, current data, facts, and information are of particular importance to Daniel. Therefore, during this conference, his focus was especially on an innovation that is also significant for the IP industry and has the potential to positively transform it. The Name of this innovation calls Chaspark Patent. Huawei launched the Chaspark Patent site in June 2024, which was unknown to me until this conference. It's a free and robust platform for researchers around the world to search for patent information, a service that can be prohibitively expensive for students, individual researchers, and small organizations in tech. Today the company announced major updates to Chaspark Patent, including new features such as semantic search and AI summary. In the future, I will extensively test this new platform in practice and report on my experiences with it.
In summary, this conference was extremely interesting not only for those interested in IP, but also for the technically interested public, and we hope to be able to participate again next year.