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Huawei earned over $630 million in patent licensing revenue in 2024, balanced IPR philosophy “widely endorsed” by industry

Olivia Sophie Rafferty

Context:

  • Huawei has made significant strides in the patent licensing world this year. In March, the company announced that it had signed more than 230 licensing agreements (including both inbound and outbound: March 31, 2025 ip fray article). Major deals in that report included Amazon and Vivo (March 5, 2024 ip fray article). Since then, it has also settled a major standard-essential patent (SEP) dispute with MediaTek (October 9, 2025 ip fray article), and at the turn of the new year, it settled its WiFi 6 SEP dispute with Netgear (January 4, 2025 ip fray article).
  • Huawei is also an industry leader in multiple major standard fields, according to its March report, including cellular communications, short-distance communications, and audio and video codecs. Studies by GreyB (May 14, 2025 ip fray article) and LexisNexis (October 7, 2025 ip fray article) confirmed that it is leading the WiFi 7 SEP ownership and cellular IoT SEP races, respectively.

What’s new: Huawei’s patent licensing revenue was approximately $630 million in 2024, the company’s Chief Legal Officer, Dr. Liuping Song, announced during its annual IP Forum in Beijing today. However, the patent royalties that Huawei has paid over the years are nearly three times the amount of royalties it has received, he noted, adding that the company also spent over $25 billion in R&D (the 6th-largest in the world), representing 20.8% of its revenue.

Direct impact: The patent licensing figure is only expected to increase, given that the company now licenses many of its patents through pools, including Via Licensing Alliance’s (LA’s) Voice Codec pool (which it helped launch last year: December 10, 2024 ip fray article), and Via LA’s HEVC/VVC patent pool as a VVC licensor and licensee (March 20, 2025 ip fray article). Huawei also recently launched a Unified Patent Court (UPC) lawsuit against Chinese mobile phone maker Transsion (August 4, 2025 ip fray article), and is currently embroiled in litigation with HMD. Huawei’s IP head Alan Fan also noted that the company has now licensed over 2.7 billion devices in the cellular communications sector, 1.2 billion in the WiFi sector, and a further 3.2 billion multimedia devices.

Wider ramifications: Huawei’s 2024 patent licensing revenue is about half of what Ericsson earned in 2024 ($1.27 billion), a third of what Nokia earned ($2 billion: Nokia 2024 report), and 10% of what Qualcomm earned ($5.57 billion: Qualcomm 2024 report). But, as noted by Mr. Fan, the company continues to focus its efforts on its “balancing philosophy”, ensuring it is a major shareholder of both sides of the innovator/implementer balance. And this balancing philosophy, he said, is widely endorsed by the industry.

This year, Huawei’s annual IP Forum event focused on the theme of “Advancing Innovation with Openness”, and speakers included:

Mr. Fan revealed some key figures on Huawei’s licensing efforts, including that the company had signed 233 patent licensing agreements by the end of 2024, and that 95% of its license-out deals were reached through negotiation and mediation. Additionally, 48 of the world’s Fortune 500 companies are now licensees of Huawei’s, either directly or indirectly through a pool program, and it has submitted over 10,000 contributions to standardization organizations.

Huawei’s annual event, which is usually held earlier in the calendar year (September 10, 2024 ip fray article), was pushed forward to November this year to coincide with the launch of its AI-facilitated Chaspark patent exchange platform, which Mr. Fan noted is free of charge and fully funded by the company’s patent licensing revenue. Huawei’s IP department was founded in 1995, so this is a 30-year “anniversary gift to the industry”, he said.