Context:
- Last month, Nokia’s President of Technology Standards, Patrik Hammarén, revealed that the company signed a new patent licensing deal with Mercedes involving its wireless technologies, and that Nokia now has four licensing agreements covering its cellular technologies with Chinese automakers in place (November 19, 2025 ip fray article).
- In May, a GreyB report entitled “Who owns WiFi 7 SEPs?” determined that Mainland China patentees lead the ownership for the number of overall WiFi 7 patent families, with Huawei taking the top spot (May 14, 2025 ip fray article). The report also noted that European patentees lag far behind Asian and U.S. WiFi 7 patent holders, with the latter two regions owning more than 60% of core standard-essential patents (SEPs).
What’s new:
- Nokia’s Chief Licensing Officer for Wireless Technologies, Susanna Martikainen, announced in a blog post today that the company has now signed a royalty-bearing bilateral patent license agreement with Stellantis, the manufacturer of Fiat, Peugeot, Jeep, and Alfa Romeo, covering the use of Nokia’s Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies in Stellantis’ vehicles (December 11, 2025 Nokia blog post).
- Ms. Martikainen also revealed today that Nokia has acquired several Wi-Fi 7-related patents from Huawei.
Direct impact: This agreement marks Nokia’s third major automotive WLAN licensing deal this year. In total, Nokia now has WLAN agreements with eight major automotive makers.
Wider ramifications: Nokia has invested over €150 billion in wireless R&D since 2000 and, as noted in the blog post, has accumulated a substantial portfolio of patents essential to the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard. Its acquisition from Huawei indicates that it is only continuing to increase that investment, and possibly enforce more of its WLAN assets.
As noted by Ms. Martikainen, for automakers, WLAN supports the delivery of over-the-air updates, subscription-based infotainment services, and data uploads that enable predictive maintenance and other analytics.
She added that this is why Nokia will continue to make an effort to ensure a sustainable innovation ecosystem for the automotive industry, and amicable agreements are always its “preferred outcome”. It is likely we will see more of such deals from Nokia.