Context: Since its first adoption in 2020, the WiFi 6 standard-essential patent (SEP) market has proven very active in terms of the SEP licensing: Huawei has played a particularly large role, especially since its settlement with Netgear four months ago (January 4, 2025 ip fray article), and Amazon (March 5, 2024 ip fray article) and German router market leader AVM (April 15, 2024 ip fray article) last year. Sisvel also manages a large WiFi 6 patent pool, with Huawei, Mediatek, Mitsubishi Electric, Orange, Panasonic, Philips, SK Telecom, and Wilus all onboard as licensors (Sisvel WiFi 6 pool). Adoption of the next generation, WiFi 7, is already occurring, albeit at a sluggish rate, with a market that is expected to reach $24.2 billion by 2030 (June 23, 2023 MarketsandMarkets report). In December, GreyB published a report entitled “Who is Ahead in the Wifi 7 Race?” which mapped the overall landscape of WiFi 7-related patents using search strategies based on keywords, technical concepts, and relevant standards.
What’s new: GreyB has today published a report entitled “Who owns WiFi 7 SEPs?” Building on its December report, it determines, based on its own methodology, which patents are “truly essential” to implementing the Wi-Fi 7 standard (IEEE 802.11be) and who owns those patents. The report reveals that European patentees lag far behind Asian and U.S. WiFi 7 patent holders, with the latter two regions owning more than 60% of core SEPs. The report also reveals that Mainland China leads in terms of the number of overall patent families, with Huawei taking the top spot.
Direct impact: Thousands of WiFi 7-related patents have already been filed, which of course drives innovation at an intense rate, but the lack of patent pools, according to GreyB, could create a higher risk of complex licensing negotiations, inflated royalty rates, and, of course, heated patent litigation. The WiFi 6 era provided a “cautionary tale”, the firm believes.
Wider ramifications: Ericsson is the only European company named in the GreyB report, with European ownership at a stark 6.7% versus Japan’s 7.4% and South Korea’s 12.8%. This significant data point also comes after a report released by data service provider Patently in January revealed Europe has a 17% landscape share of 5G SEPs among patent families with at least one U.S. member (while the U.S. has 20% and Asia has 67%: January 3, 2025 ip fray article). These are key statistics that the EU should take into account when mulling its SEP policy (currently on “timeout”: March 6, 2025 ip fray article).
The top Wi Fi 7 core SEP holders
Huawei tops the tables for the overall number of WiFi 7-related patent families (648), while South Korea’s LG comes in a close second (620), and Intel (397), Qualcomm (323), and Mediatek (213) take the next three spots. The top 10 also includes Samsung, Oppo, NXP, and Japan’s Canon and Sony.
Mainland Chinese companies take the lead in terms of the overall number of WiFi 7 SEP families. They also own 52.17% of WiFi 7 SEPs in Europe and 52.50% in Japan, which will give them a potentially enormous influence over these markets. U.S. companies, meanwhile, own a majority share of their own market (45.37%) and a significant proportion of Europe’s market (21.74%). South Korean businesses also lead on home turf, owning a 45.45% share of their own market.
However, when it comes to core SEPs, U.S. entities hold the majority (227), and are followed by Mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Europe.
GreyB’s report suggests once again that the EU should do more to support European companies’ efforts to obtain SEPs, which includes their ability to receive reasonable royalties so as to fund the next round of innovations.
The proposed EU SEP regulation, which was dropped earlier this year (February 11, 2025 ip fray article) after pressure from key market players (January 16, 2025 ip fray article), became “stuck” in the first place due to a shift in geopolitical circumstances, according to Directorate General for Single Market and Industry (DG GROW) IP deputy director Kamil Kiljański (March 6, 2025 ip fray article).
Some pushback has followed the withdrawal, including a letter from EU Member States Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia and Spain, asking for the regulation to be put back on the table for discussion (May 7, 2025 open letter). It is unclear whether the Member States want to draft a new proposal or bring back the old one.
However, the withdrawal was made in line with earlier discussions around decreasing overregulation. Europe’s tech sector lags behind those in the U.S. and China. In the U.S. for example, the “Magnificent Seven” U.S. tech firms’ spend on R&D was equal to 50% of Europe’s entire public and private sector R&D spend across technology and other areas in 2023 alone – and this has led to a €450 billion gap in tech R&D spending (June 20, 2024 McKinsey Global Institute report). This gap has contributed to a 20% productivity disadvantage per year (May 2024, ECIPE Policy Brief).
Key patentee industries
The largest share of core Wi-Fi 7 SEPs (44%) is held by companies in the semiconductor industry. This is unsurprising, according to GreyB, as these companies are directly involved in developing the core silicon that powers WiFi 7 devices.
Telecoms companies hold the second-largest share (26%), while electronics & hardware companies (23.3%) come in third place. Only a very minor 1.3% of university/academia entities are present, meaning industry players are driving the WiFi 7 standardization process.
Core Wi-Fi 7 SEP technologies
The report also underlines the distribution of SEPs across different technology areas. As shown below, the highest number of core SEPs are related to Multi-Link Operation (MLO) and Extremely High Throughput (EHT) technologies.
Overall essentiality results
Only 149 of the 314 WiFi 7-related patent families were core SEPs (containing at least one independent claim that is considered essential to implementing the IEEE 802.11be standard), which GreyB highlights as key to understanding that a large proportion of patents related to WiFi 7 are not essential to the standard. Also, the report says, only 368 Wi-Fi 7 patent families are declared to the IEEE, while 3,848 are undeclared. This represents only 9% of the estimated total, with just six companies having made declarations, the firm has found.
GreyB also notes that there is a significant discrepancy between publicly declared and undeclared patents.
Methodology
GreyB’s declared patent numbers were directly sourced from the IEEE website’s patent database, while undeclared patent families relevant to IEEE 802.11be were identified through a combination of keywords and patent classifications with the following timeframe: January 1, 2016 to March 31, 2025. The report notes that this timeframe aligns with the development and drafting of the IEEE 802.11be standard, ensuring the inclusion of patents covering key WiFi 7 innovations.
To be eligible for essentiality analysis, the families required at least one active and granted patent as of March 31, 2025 (not expired or abandoned), and the team then used a mix of claim-to-standard mapping, device applicability and the ability to demonstrate full technical overlap with the WiFi standard to ensure they were indeed core SEPs.