Context:
- The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (UKSC) is conducting a Tesla v. InterDigital & Avanci hearing, which started on Monday (April 27, 2026 ip fray article) and will conclude in a couple of hours. ip fray is following the proceedings (April 28, 2026 ip fray article).
- Throughout the proceedings, even in the courts below, it was known that Tesla had a bilateral license, covering (exclusively or inter alia) 5G standard-essential patents (SEPs), with an Avanci 5G licensor. But the name of that company was treated as confidential business information.
What’s new: This morning (by local time) InterDigital’s lead barrister, Thomas Raphael KC, unveiled the identity of that licensor by uniquely identifying it as “the single biggest licensor”. The single biggest 5G SEP holder is Huawei, and Huawei is an Avanci 5G licensor. This secret has ceased to be.
Direct impact: What is not known is whether the deal is 5G-specific or more comprehensive, but the latter is far more likely. Huawei is known to enter into portfolio license deals.
Wider ramifications: Huawei has a very successful licensing business. We interviewed its head of strategic planning, Emil Zhang, this month (April 20, 2026 ip fray article) and report on Huawei’s annual IP Forum every year. A few months ago, Huawei made it known that its patent licensing revenue in 2024 was $630M, which is more than it may seem (as one has to consider that Huawei is also a high-volume implementer and therefore has to enter into many cross-license agreements; also, Huawei’s dual role makes it important for the company to strike a reasonable balance between revenue generation and maintaining reasonable cost levels for its own products).
Mr. Raphael KC is doing a great job at the hearing, though there are no signs of the court agreeing with him any more than it did with Avanci’s counsel. As discussed yesterday, Tesla may win this battle, but it cannot win the war. There is no realistic possibility of Avanci’s 5G rate being lowered by even one cent as a result of Tesla’s litigation campaign.
Such inadvertent disclosures happen in the heat of the action. We have a duty to provide as much relevant information to our readers as possible, provided that we have lawfully obtained it and do not breach any moral or legal confidentiality obligation. For example, we also reported a few months ago when Amazon’s counsel disclosed a patent royalty demand (February 12, 2026 ip fray article).
We do, of course, protect our sources when we receive confidential information, and we often know more (sometimes a lot more) than we are authorized to write about at a given time.
It is not known when Huawei and Tesla concluded a license deal. It is, however, highly unlikely that it happened before the Avanci 5G pool was put in place (in 2023). At that point, Huawei would presumably have referred Tesla to the pool, and Tesla had no immediate need for a 5G license. It still, by its own representations, has not launched a 5G-capable car (at least not in the UK). That is, in fact, a key argument in their current UK litigation: they want to achieve legal certainty in advance of shipping 5G cars. Therefore, the most plausible explanation is that 5G was included in a broad portfolio license deal well in advance of the Avanci 5G pool.
Whatever the circumstances and motives were at the time, it shows that bilateral licensing is an option. And Huawei is a particularly good example because it holds a wide variety of patents, not only cellular SEPs. Nokia and Ericsson are similar examples of companies that are virtually certain to hold non-cellular patents (WiFi, computer graphics, circuitry etc.) that Tesla needs to license, but Avanci 5G can secure them only a license to those (and other) companies’ 5G SEPs.