(Yicai Global) March 17 -- Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies has revealed its plans to begin charging handset makers and wireless carriers for its fifth-generation network patents.

The highest fee for each phone would be USD2.50, the Shenzhen-based firm said in a white paper released yesterday.

Huawei will talk with each phonemaker and mobile operator to decide on a reasonable fee, Jason Ding, head of Huawei’s intellectual property department, said at a press conference.

With the practice, principally all wireless carriers and smartphone makers that use Huawei's technology, including Apple and Samsung, would need to pay the Chinese firm. 

The handset maker has nearly 26,000 5G patents, mainly involving digital information transmission and wireless communication network technology, Yicai Global learned from patent search platform PatSnap.

It is normal to charge licensing fees for standard essential patents, required to comply with a technical standard, said an IP expert at PatSnap. Foreign firms used to do that in China and Huawei's move should not hurt the industry but encourage more Chinese firms to protect their innovations, the person added.

Gains

Huawei is expected to post from USD1.2 billion to USD1.3 billion in IP revenue from 2019 to this year after starting to charge for 5G patents and the policy should be extended from telecoms infrastructure to consumer electronics and the Internet of Things, including connected vehicles, Ding predicted.

Huawei is an important technical contributor to the 5G network standards and follows fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms in fee collection, said Ding. The firm is hoping to present its clients with transparent cost regimes and therefore increase their investment certainty in order to promote the widespread use of 5G, he added.

It remains to be seen how the initiative will unfold in the US. "Huawei has over 10,000 patents in the US which have brought value to the country’s industries, but we do not call it an indirect path to enter the US market,” Song Liuping, Huawei’s chief legal officer, told Yicai Global.

Huawei applied for its first patent in China in 1995 and the first in the US in 1999. Now the company has more patents than anyone else in China, according to public data. Moreover, it was second in the total number of patents in Europe in 2019, and No. 10 in the US. 

The handset maker had secured more than 100,000 patents globally by last December, and over 90 percent of them are for innovation, according to the white paper.

Editor: Tang Shihua, Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi