Context: Since 2019, Huawei has held an annual innovation and intellectual property event, typically also with some high-profile speakers from abroad.
What’s new: On Friday (September 6, 2024), the latest edition of the event took place in China. This article summarizes the most interesting statements from three angles:
- Huawei’s patent portfolio and related strategies;
- Huawei’s Chaspark patent research platform; and
- Huawei’s commitment to open source software development.
Direct impact & wider ramifications: All three parts have one thing in common: unfazed by certain geopolitical tendencies, Huawei unwaveringly champions the cause of openness in (and sharing of) innovation. With a view to patent licensing and enforcement, there was no indication
A voice-synchronized (to English) recording has become available on Huawei’s Chaspark website. On that basis, ip fray was able to follow the event in its entirety and summarize the key points.
1. Huawei’s patent portfolio and related strategies
Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer Dr. Song Liuping acknowledged “challenges” over the past few years, but reiterated the company’s commitment to open innovation and progress:
“We will always be open, collaborative and innovative.”
Dr. Song noted an R&D spend north of 20% of revenues and a portfolio of over 140,000 active patents.
The head of the company’s IPR department, Alan Fan, likewise focused on what Huawei does to open up its innovations: standards (over 130K contributions submitted to SDOs), open source (more than 110 million lines of code contributed to the Harmony operating system project alone), patents (more than 36,000 patents published in 2023 in 37 different languages), and more than 6,000 academic papers.
Mr. Fan noted that 95% of Huawei’s license deals are reached through negotiation, but where litigation proves inevitable, he noted “favorable court rulings” on some key patents.
Those using Huawei’s patented inventions should expect no major strategic change based on the messages and the tone of the presentations on Friday. Neither is there any sign of Huawei departing from the balance that is inherent to the unique situation of a company that is a major implementer as well as a major patent holder with an active licensing business, nor does it look like Huawei is going to condone infringement.
The message that patent licensing is a means of sharing innovation was also delivered, from a different vantage point, by the president of the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), Sonja London. She said that IP was not created to restrict knowledge, but to enable the openness of innovation. In that context she also discussed the importance of standards. Another speaker, Mrs. Lei Xiaoyun from China’s Intellectual Proprty Protection Association, noted that “more and more Chinese homegrown IP is used worldwide” and offered the prediction that “China will only become more and more open” in that regard.
2. Chaspark patent research platform
Unlike the previous innovation and IP events, this year’s edition was streamed via the Chaspark.com website rather than Huawei’s general corporate website.
Chaspark is a platform for efficient access to patent information, particularly a keyword-based patent search. A couple of its features and uses cases were demonstrated at the event, such as a search for the combination of a patent holder and a field of technology.
With a library of more than 192 million documents and machine translation built in, Chaspark looks like what Google Patents could have become if Google had been committed to it. But Google has a reputation for letting some services wither, and has shut down hundreds of services over the years (Killed by Google website).
One of Huawei’s partners in the Chaspark project is PatSnap.
The website can be used for scientific research. For instance, Chaspark was used for the first comprehensive technical analysis of ChatGPT performed in China.
ip fray will use Chaspark for patent searches in connection with its research efforts, alongside Google Patents and other tools, and see how it works. The first impression is definitely positive.
3. Huawei’s commitment to open source software development
Open source is often described as the antithesis to patents: while the publication of open source program code disseminates knowledge like the publication of a patent application, open source licenses limit or often even exclude IP assertions against those exercising their rights under such licenses.
in Bryan Che, whose open source career involves many years at Red Hat and the Eclipse Foundation, Huawei definitely has an open source thought leader who understands the business as well as community aspects of that development model. Mr. Che proudly noted that Huawei’s Harmony operating system (for IoT in general, but also for smartphones that no longer need Android or Linux) has become the number one open source project in China.
He also explained that contributing to open source projects can make a lot of business sense. According to a recent research study by the Harvard Business School, the demand-side value of the most popular open source projects is valued at $8.8 trillion, a mindblowing number that is roughly half of the GDP of China.
A little over a month ago, the Wall Street Journal (America’s leading financial publication, and a major conservative media outlet) wrote: “The U.S. Wanted to Knock Down Huawei. It’s Only Getting Stronger.” Friday’s event was focused on innovation and IP, not a general corporate strategy presentation. But openness and collaboration may be two pillars of Huawei’s ability to emerge stronger.