Context: The cellular IoT space will play a central role in the next decades of tech advancement, but with the standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing business in this sector still in its infancy, licensors and licensees are presented with a set of unique challenges. Royalty rates (unlike in the smartphone market), for example, are far from being standardized. There are also several questions that need answering for SEP holders and implementers to be able to navigate the landscape effectively, including who holds the SEPs, what percentage is covered by patent pool programs, and what the aggregate royalty amount for all SEPs related to a particular cellular IoT standard is. The answers to these questions are still not publicly available.
What’s new: LexisNexis, which produces reports that seek to answer such questions, has today published a report entitled “Who Is Leading the Cellular IoT Patent Race?”, which, among other things, reveals the steady incline of patent filers in each of NB-IoT, LTE-M, Cat 1 and V2X technologies, as well as the leading patentees for each category (October 7, 2025 cellular IoT Report). Some key findings include:
- Huawei leads all four categories, while Qualcomm is a frontrunner in NB-IoT and LTE-M, and LG Electronics is for Cat 1 and V2X.
- Several top-ranked companies have joined all three of the different patent licensing programs from Avanci and Sisvel, while some leaders have not joined any of these programs as licensors.
- Patent assertion entities (PAEs) are among the top cellular IoT SEP holders.
Direct impact: The increasing presence of PAEs underlines the commercial and strategic value of cellular IoT SEPs, but it also introduces “additional complexity” for implementers navigating the licensing landscape, according to the report. PAEs have emerged as the primary driver behind the doubling of US SEP litigation over the past decade (August 27, 2025 LexisNexis US SEP litigation report), and the entry of PAEs into emerging SEP licensing markets, such as IoT, significantly increases the risk exposure for implementers operating in these spaces, LexisNexis notes.
Wider ramifications: As noted in the report, the aim of such patent data is to help uncover the often-hidden landscape of SEPs, enabling IP professionals to quantify both the numerator (patents owned) and the denominator (total patents for a standard) to assess ownership share fairly. Understanding who owns which SEPs in a particular technology landscape is critical for both the owners and the implementers, and transparency in data like this should lead to more efficient patent licensing negotiations.
To Read The Full Story
Continue reading your article with a Membership
Methodology
To put together this report, LexisNexis used worldwide patents declared to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) under the 4G and 5G technical standards. It then used its own tool (LexisNexis Classification) to detect patents relevant to each cellular IoT standard to determine which of them related to NB-IoT, LTE-M, LTE-Cat 1, and V2X. The landscape this produced includes both SEPs and non-SEPs, it notes, due to the limitations of the ETSI self-declaration database.
LexisNexis also highlighted:
“17% of all ETSI-declared 4G and 5G patent families were identified as relevant to cellular IoT technologies, representing a significant portion of the broader 4G and 5G patent landscape.”