Who is leading the 5G patent race? A patent landscape analysis on declared SEPs and standards contributions April 2019 1 The long-term vision is that 5G will empower the invention of thousands of new products, technologies and services, increase productivity and allow for new industries to emerge. A global 5G network will unify mobile communication in order to connect individuals or devices to everything through the Internet of Things (IoT). 5G technologies will connect vehicles, ships, buildings, meters, machines and other items with electronics, software, sensors and the cloud. Embedded 5G technologies will e.g. allow machines to exchange information yielding a direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems. The past years have shown that patent owners for 3G and 4G controlled how mobile technologies were used in the smart phone industry. Thus, also 5G patent owners will likely become technology and market leaders to enable 5G connectivity in various markets. Using the database and analytics of the IPlytics Platform tool, table 1 illustrates an increasing number of 5G declared standard essential patents over the past 4 years. Standard essential patents (SEPs) are those that any company will have to use when implementing the standardized 5G technology. The numbers show a sharp increase arriving at over sixty thousand 5G SEPs. Table 1: Yearly number of declared standard essential patents for 5G as to declaration date 5G Standard Essential Patents Over Time 60.000 53.935 50.000 40.000 30.000 20.000 10.000 11.662 2.055 2.053 2015 2016 4.826* 0 2017 2018 2019 *As to April 2019 IPlytics Platform – The IP Intelligence Tool | [email protected] | www.iplytics.com 2 The analysis was based on state-of-the-art stemming and semantic indexing methods searching in full text declared SEPs patent documents as well as in full text standards and contribution documents. Figure 1 illustrates how the data on patents, declared SEPs, standards and contribution documents is structured. Figure 1. Data integration of patents, declared SEPs, standards and contributions 90 M Patent Documents Worldwide Patents (USA, Europe, Korea, Japan, China, etc.) • • • • 280.000 Extended patent families Legal status (pending/granted, lapsed/revoked/active/expired) Worldwide reassignment information Worldwide litigation information SEP declarations 4M Declared Standard Essential Patents • • • • 30 SDOs and 11 patent pools Patent and standards document ID Licensing commitments (e.g. FRAND, reciprocity) Patent Pools Standards Documents Standards / Contributions • 2,5 M standards documents (Full text, author, supporting company) • 1,5 M standards contributions (Full text, author, contributing company) • Type (TS, TR, CR, WI), Status (revised, agreed, approved, noted) While the implementation of 3G and 4G mainly concerned the smart phone industry, 5G will enable such connectivity in the whole physical world through e.g. the Internet of Things (IoT). In future, any sector subject to connectivity e.g. transport, energy, manufacturing, healthcare or entertainment will make use of 5G and thus also use 5G standard essential patents. Successful 3G and 4G patent licensing programs have provided evidence that patent royalty incomes are highly lucrative and the target market for licensing 5G patents will even increase since 5G patent holders will be able to extend their licensing program to various use cases beyond smart phones. Using the database and analytics of the IPlytics Platform tool, table 2 illustrates the top patent owner of declared standard essential 5G patents. The Chinese company Huawei has the largest portfolio followed by the Finish company Nokia and the South Korean companies Samsung and LG. Qualcomm and Intel are the largest US companies holding 5G SEPs, Sharp and Fujitsu are the largest Japanese 5G SEP owners. IPlytics Platform – The IP Intelligence Tool | [email protected] | www.iplytics.com 3 Table 2: Top 5G standard essential patent owner as to the number of patent families Top 5G SEP family owner 1.554 1.427 1.316 1.274 1.208 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (CN) Nokia (incl. Alcatel-Lucent) (FI) Samsung (KR) LG Electronics (KR) ZTE Corp. (CN) 846 819 QUALCOMM Inc. (US) Ericsson Inc. (SE) 551 545 468 Intel Corp (US) China Academy Of Telecommunications Technology (catt) (CN) Sharp Corp (JP) 207 Guangdong Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp., Ltd (CN) 20 18 14 13 12 10 9 8 8 8 8 7 2 1