ip fray obtained the following information following an announcement by Xiaomi’s Na Wei on LinkedIn (October 1, 2025 LinkedIn post by Na Wei). ip fray then secured permission to cover the following information outside of the Via Licensing Alliance’s Bridge Summit, which is expressly under Chatham House rules.
Context:
- In January, Na Wei, the former senior director of IP licensing, succeeded Ran Xu as the first woman to lead IP strategy for Xiaomi. Since she came on board, the company has celebrated several significant SEP wins, including defeating non-practising entity Nera’s patent infringement claims in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and in the German national court (July 10, 2025 ip fray article).
- At the end of September, Via Licensing Alliance hosted its annual Bridge Summit (during which it announced plans to launch several patent licensing programs that focus on semiconductor technologies: September 25, 2025 ip fray article). Ms. Wei delivered a keynote and company update.
What’s new: Following the Summit, Ms. Wei was kind enough to share the contents of what she discussed with ip fray, which included statistics on the smartphone market, Xiaomi’s vision, and her own personal views on cooperation and what a sustainable IP ecosystem should look like. Some highlights include:
- The smartphone market in 2025 is “flat”. The reasons behind this, she notes, are a lower level of consumer demand, with the average period to replace a phone becoming longer. There is a “lack of revolutionary technology, which can motivate a large scale of consumers in the saturated market to buy a new phone,” she says.
- Xiaomi will cumulatively invest RMB 102 billion ($14 billion) in R&D between 2021 and 2025, with 2025 alone exceeding RMB 30 billion ($4.1 million).
- As of Q1 2025, Xiaomi has accumulated over 43,000 global granted patents.
- Every deal is not isolated, but “a stone added to a scale”: one unreasonable deal adds “weight to the chaos”. So the IP community should reward reasonable licensors and licensees, and “stand firmly” together against unreasonable counterparts.
Direct impact and wider ramifications: Ms. Wei’s comments about the smartphone market certainly won’t fall on deaf ears, although they are likely already a sentiment among the patent licensing community. Her call for a firm stance against “unreasonable counterparts”, meanwhile, is another indication of how much Xiaomi – a patent owner with increasing patent assets – wishes to create a balanced licensing ecosystem.
More than a smartphone maker
Ms. Wei emphasizes that, while Xiaomi began as a smartphone “disruptor”, the company is now building something with a “bigger vision” on one smart ecosystem for Human- x – Car- x Home”:
- In 2023, it announced its mission to expand into the automotive and home appliances industries
- To support this vision, Xiaomi will cumulatively invest RMB 102 billion ($14 billion) in R&D between 2021 and 2025, with 2025 alone exceeding RMB 30 billion ($4.1 million)
- This has allowed it to build a portfolio of over 43,000 global granted patents, rank 8th globally and top 3 in China for 5G standard-essential patent (SEP) declarations, and now it also accelerates research for 6G standards development.
‘A market without growth’
But, Ms. Wei warns, the smartphone market in 2025 can only be described in one word:
“Flat.”
Aside from lower consumer demand, Ms. Wei noted that when looking at the competition among major OEMs, the difference between the top five in terms of shipment between 2025 Q2 and 2024 Q2 is less than 1%.
“Because every player has done their best to keep their market share from falling, there is a lack of revolutionary technology motivating consumers to buy a new phone,” she notes.
Ms. Wei says the smartphone market is saturated and hosts a hyper-competitive landscape.
A successful IP ecosystem
Ms. Wei also discusses the cycle of a sustainable IP ecosystem, in which IP licensing should act as an “invisible hand” creating a closed loop of technological innovation, industrial innovation, and consumer adoption.
She breaks it down as follows:
- Consumers are willing and able to pay for the product with innovative technologies
- Product/licensee pays reasonable fees
- Innovator reinvests in new technology
- Product/licensee industrializes the new technology
- Consumers get better products
- Ecosystem thrives
- But when fees become ransoms, this cycle breaks.
In her own personal capacity, she refers to a book entitled “The Evolution of Cooperation”, written by political scientist Robert Axelrod, which discusses the best strategy in an uncoordinated, self-interest system.
Despite not needing to read the book to know this, as it should just come from “life wisdom”, Ms. Wei concludes that “key factors for good cooperation include frequent interactions, the establishment of reputation and trust, and the clustering of cooperative individuals”.
However, the reality of business is “much more complicated than that”, she adds.
Every deal in the IP ecosystem is correlated, or intertwined, and so what happens in one deal will “ripple across the entire system”. For example, she says:
- When an opportunistic licensor exploits their market position to demand unreasonable royalties, they might walk away with a short-term win. If such unreasonable licensors are rewarded, others might follow suit.
- Similarly, if an opportunistic licensee gets a better deal, more will test boundaries.
Ms. Wei concluded that the community should come together to reward those licensors and licensees who approach things reasonably, and stand firmly against those who do the opposite:
“When you have to make hard decisions, please think about this ecosystem and think about the impact on other dots.”