Huawei announced on Wednesday that it had reached a patent license agreement with a supplier of Volkswagen Group.
The agreement includes Huawei’s Essential Patent (SEP) license for 4G standards, covering Volkswagen vehicles with wireless connectivity. It is the largest licensing deal reached by Huawei in the automotive industry so far.
Song Liuping, chief legal officer of Huawei, said: “As an innovative enterprise, Huawei has a leading patent portfolio of wireless technologies, which has created great value for the automotive industry. We are glad to see that key players in the automotive industry recognize the value of our patents. We believe that through this license, worldwide consumers will benefit from our advanced technology.”
Huawei expects that more than 30 million vehicles will obtain its patent licenses based on existing license agreements. In the past 20 years, Huawei has entered more than 100 patent licensing agreements with major global manufacturers across Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea.
According to news from Tencent, as of March 5, 2021, Huawei owns a total of 357 patents related to automobile, automatic driving, radar and maps.
Among the 357 patents, 137 of them contained the keywords “automatic driving”, accounting for 38.37%; Radar, a technology that plays an important role in automatic driving, accounts for 16.8%. Further, There are 96 patents with the keywords “electric vehicles”, accounting for 26.9%; and 30 patents relate to charging, accounting for 8.4%.
However, in terms of patents related to automobiles, Huawei still has a long way to go. According to media reports, Audi, a traditional automobile manufacturer, submitted more than 1,200 patents in 2019 alone, with more than three patent applications every day. Chinese new electric-vehicle maker NIO has filed more than 4,000 patents and Xpeng Motors has more than 1,500 patents.