Context: The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) declaration database is the largest of its kind, currently containing over 555,000 declared patents and 102,943 patent families as of October 31, 2024. Today, many ETSI-declaring companies self-declare patents at the earliest possible stage to avoid the risk of late-declared patents then being ruled as unenforceable. This, however, means that ETSI’s database will often include unpublished provisional or priority patents and any top-down analyses of 4G or 5G patent owners can become biased, underrepresenting the patent portfolio size of companies that share less information while favoring those that declare more extensively. According to LexisNexis, 40% of self-declared patents cannot be directly matched to normalized and cleaned patent information, while roughly 20% of matched numbers result in false positives due to the ambiguity of patent numbers.
What’s new: LexisNexis has today announced an initiative (“Cellular Verified”) to solve this issue. Over the course of a year, the firm collaborated with over 30 of the top 5G patent-holding companies, to match, clean and verify its database of patent families with that of ETSI’s (LexisNexis Cellular Verified initiative page). The initiative provides a “clean, unbiased” database of declared patents, and provides data updates every week to ensure it is current, it has stated.
Direct impact and wider ramifications: LexisNexis said it has already achieved 99.9% data accuracy through this initiative, while Alan Fan, chief IP officer at Huawei (who took part in the collaboration) said the initiative is a “testament to the power of industry partnerships in driving meaningful progress and innovation forward.” Fan also noted that Cellular Verified provides “clarity to the market” – a key aim of the proposed EU regulation on standard-essential patents (SEP).
LexisNexis today also released its annual 5G report: “Who is Leading the 5G Patent Race?” which notes that the number of granted 5G patent declarations has more than doubled in the past three years, growing from slightly over 25,000 declared 5G granted patent families in 2021 to over 57,000 in 2024 (LexisNexis “Who is Leading the 5G Patent Race?” 2025 report).
As noted by the analytics firm, however, the self-declaration process introduces significant variability, as companies follow different approaches when declaring their patents. While some may provide only provisional numbers, others declare their applications, grants, and all jurisdictional counterparts.
The quality and completeness of patent declarations vary widely among declaring companies, they said. For example, companies like Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Oppo provide “clean and consistent declarations”, always disclosing all published patent numbers. Companies with a high proportion of provisional or priority numbers in their declarations – such as Ericsson, Qualcomm, Nokia, Huawei, and Intel – show particularly high numbers of non-matched ETSI-declared patent families.
The graph below illustrates this discrepancy:
But the Cellular Verified initiative has sought to fix that through four main steps:
- expanding family coverage: identifying missing patent family counterparts to ensure a complete global view of declared patents;
- matching and cleaning data: standardizing patent numbers across formats to achieve 99.9% accuracy through advanced matching algorithms and company feedback;
- classifying patents by standard generation: cross-referencing patents with ETSI datasets to accurately classify them by technology generation (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G); and
- enhancing ownership data: updating legal status and harmonizing ownership records using corporate tree data to reflect acquisitions and reassignment.
LexisNexis said today that it has had huge success in its matching and cleaning efforts, with the average matching rate improved from t1 (initial matching efforts) to t7 (advanced application of matching processes) to Cellular Verified (final verified matching with feedback from declaring companies) – as shown in this chart below:
In a statement today, Tim Pohlmann, managing director of Americas and director of SEP analytics for LexisNexis, said patent declaration data is “inherently inconsistent” and shaped by each company’s unique declaration practices. Without proper processes in place to clean and verify that data, companies that provide more detailed and cleaner information will be favoured.
“This creates significant challenges for the industry, from licensing negotiations to FRAND rate determinations,” he added.
Huawei’s chief IP officer Alan Fan also said today that the industry has long faced challenges with gaps, redundancies, and errors in patent declaration data, which can lead to inefficiencies in licensing and disputes. He noted that Huawei’s – and the industry’s – collaborative work with LexisNexis has “significantly strengthened” the accuracy of patent declaration data for all stakeholders. The initiative is a “testament” to the power of industry partnerships in driving “meaningful progress” and innovation forward, he added.
The initiative comes after the proposed EU SEP Regulation, which aims, among other things, to set up a competence center at the EU IP Office that will administer an SEP registry and database, was adopted by the European Parliament last February. It emerged in December, however, that the bill for the proposed regulation was stuck in the EU Council and might not move forward for ten years (December 5, 2024 ip fray article).
The EU SEP Regulation has been strongly criticised by industry members, including Nokia and Ericsson, who co-hosted a summit in Brussels last week to “catalyze the momentum across the EU to implement the actions required to deliver future European digitalization success” (January 16, 2025 ip fray article). The withdrawal of “harmful proposals” like the proposed EU SEP Regulation was one of key points on the agenda at the summit, which was addressed by chief executives at Nokia and Ericsson, as well as ASML and SAP and several top European policymakers.
Nokia and Ericsson were joined by Huawei as the top three 5G-related technical standard contributors in LexisNexis’ 5G patent race report. While we cannot confirm that either of the former two have taken part in the Cellular Verified initiative, Huawei was quoted in the announcement and is therefore likely onboard. The remainder of the companies also remain unnamed.
The number of 5G-related technical standard submissions, which, overall, has surpassed 80,000 – an all-time high, according to the LexisNexis. However, it notes, historical ownership analysis also indicates that the majority of 5G patents will expire within the next 10 years, impacting future licensing strategies.
The report also highlighted that Chinese-headquartered companies now account for 40% of 5G-declared patent families, with those based in the U.S., South Korea and Europe tailing closely behind at 15-20% each.
The report also used the Patent Asset Index – a LexisNexis tool used to measure the portfolio strengths of each of the top 50 5G patent owners – and this year it found that patent assertion entities are increasingly rising in those rankings. For example, Pegasus Wireless, which acquired 5G patents from KT Corp, moved from 74 to 34, while Longhorn IP, which acquired 5G portfolios from FG Innovation and Shanghai Langbo, advanced its rank from 83 to 38. Ireland’s Key Patent Innovations, which obtained a 5G portfolio from Blackberry, also improved its ranking position by more than 30 places (from 79 to 42).