Context: Huawei has had an eventful 12 months. Most recently, it announced its intention to join Via Licensing Alliance’s HEVC/VVC patent pool as a VVC licensor and licensee (March 20, 2025 ip fray article). And, at the turn of the new year, it settled its WiFi 6 standard-essential patent (SEP) dispute with Netgear (January 4, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: The company today released its annual report for 2024 (PDF), announcing that – as of December 31, 2024 – it had signed more than 230 licensing agreements (including both inbound and outbound).
Direct impact and wider ramifications: Huawei’s net profit saw a 28% year-on-year drop. However, this is largely due to a huge surge in R&D investments, according to Rotating Chairwoman Meng Wanzhou. The company spent 179.7 billion Chinese yuan ($24.7 billion) on R&D in 2024, representing 20.8% of its revenue and a 22.4% year-on-year surge. It has now spent over 1.2 trillion Chinese yuan ($165 billion) on R&D over the last decade. As of December, more than half (54.1%) of the company’s workforce was made up of R&D staff (113,000 people) – suggesting that the company is doubling down on becoming a technology leader and licensor.
In its annual report today, Huawei stated that the company is an industry leader in patents in multiple major standard fields, including cellular communications, short-distance communications, and audio and video codecs.
In 2024, it signed major deals with Amazon and Vivo (March 5, 2024 ip fray article), both of which involved 5G patents. It also helped launch Via LA’s Voice Codec pool alongside Dolby, ETRI, JVCKenwood, and NTT(December 10, 2024 ip fray article) and transferred over 760 3GPP-related patent assets to Ueran Technology, a U.S.-based non-practising entity, that were previously owned by Samsung, Sharp, Innovation Technologies Lab, and Alcatel Lucent.
In its report, Huawei also emphasized its commitment to the ICT sector, noting it has reached cross-license agreements with several major ICT companies across the globe. In 2024, those included deals with EDMI for “a cellular IoT Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) license, including NB-IoT, LTE-M and LTE Cat. 1” (April 11, 2024 ip fray article) and AVM, the German WiFi router market leader (April 15, 2024 ip fray article).
This year has already been eventful for Huawei, given its settlement with Negear and its announcement of joining Via LA’s HEVC/VVC pool, but we will likely see more soon. Last July, the company sued Taiwan’s MediaTek over several unknown SEPs. Earlier this month, MediaTek survived a jurisdictional challenge in the UK prong of that case.