ITP.net recently virtually participated in Huawei’s “Creating IP, Driving Innovation: Broadening the Innovation Landscape 2022”, held at its Shenzhen headquarters.
During the event, Huawei announced key inventions as part of its biennial “Top Ten Inventions” Awards. The award is designed to recognise inventions that could create new series of products, become important commercial features of existing products, or that generate considerable value for the company and the industry.
Speaking exclusively with ITP.net, Alan Fan, Head of Intellectual Property Department, Huawei, shared insights on the top 10 inventions that have been deployed in the Middle East. The inventions include the BladeAAU Base Station Antenna Minimalist Deployment Solution and Indoor Distributed Massive MIMO Solution. The electromagnetic transparency technology helps make the co-existence of multi-band antenna modules a reality and simplifies the deployment of BladeAAUs where massive MIMO and passive antennas are integrated. The solution allows carriers to quickly deploy 5G Massive MIMO while ensuring an optimal 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G network performance.
“BladeAAUs have been deployed on a large scale in the Middle East,” said Fan. “For example, in Qatar, the solution helped operators quickly deploy 5G to ensure they will provide the best possible experience to the global audience in the 2022 FIFA World Cup. In Bahrain, this solution helped the operator address the difficulty in deploying 5G over the primary and secondary bands within limited site space. In the UAE, the solution helped operators install 5G higher on towers despite restrictions with existing sites, which increased network coverage and improved user experience,” he added.
Another invention that has been deployed in the Middle East is Storage AA Cluster Solution with Globally Balanced Expansion and High Reliability. “The solution has been successfully applied to dozens of leading companies in the Middle East, including companies in the finance and energy sectors and government agencies. The solution has helped industry benchmarks in Saudi, Oman, Qatar, and UAE to accelerate digital transformation and monetise data. The high throughput, low latency, and high reliability delivered by the solution enable data infrastructure transformation across various sectors. This has, in turn, enabled larger financial transactions and made energy production more efficient, and government and enterprise services more accessible,” he said.
“Most of these inventions are new technologies, and many of them are still in the process of being translated into products. Moving forward, more of these technologies will be deployed in the Middle East and other parts of the world, and we will bring better products and experiences to industries and consumers,” said Fan.
The announcement came in the context of intellectual property rights, the protection and sharing of which Huawei believes is critical to the tech ecosystem.
Also speaking at the event, Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer, Song Liuping, said, “Protecting IP is key to protecting innovation. We are eager to license our patents and technologies to share our innovations with the world. This will help broaden the innovation landscape, drive our industry forward, and advance technology for everyone.”
By the end of 2021, Huawei held more than 110,000 active patents across over 45,000 patent families. It has more granted patents than any other Chinese company, has filed the most patent applications with the EU Patent Office, and ranked fifth in terms of new patents granted in the United States. For five straight years, Huawei has ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of Patent Cooperation Treaty applications.
Fan highlighted that the value of Huawei patents has seen wide recognition in the industry, especially in mainstream standards such as cellular technology, Wi-Fi, and audio/video codecs.
“In the past five years, more than two billion smartphones have been licensed to Huawei’s 4G/5G patents. And for cars, about eight million connected vehicles licensed to Huawei patents are being delivered to the consumers every year,” Fan stated.
Huawei is also working actively with patent license administration companies in offering “one-stop” licenses for mainstream standards.
“Over 260 companies—accounting for one billion devices—have obtained Huawei’s HEVC patent licenses through a patent pool,” Fan said. He added that the company is in discussions to establish a new patent pool to give the industry “quick access” to Huawei’s patents for Wi-Fi devices worldwide.
Huawei is also discussing joint licensing programmes for 5G patents with licensing experts and other leading industry patentees.
“Digitalisation creates additional opportunities for economic growth,” says Huawei Cloud president
This marked the third innovation and IP-themed event Huawei has hosted on its innovation practices. Every year, Huawei invests over 10 percent of its sales revenue into R&D.
In terms of R&D expenditure, Huawei ranked second in the 2021 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. In 2021, the company increased its R&D investment to CNY142.7 billion, representing 22.4 percent of our total revenue. Over the past decade, Huawei’s total R&D investment surpassed CNY845 billion.
