Huawei forum tackles the benefits and challenges of balancing openness with IP protection

Details: Staff Writer; Category: Vendors; 18 November 2025; 52753 views

Huawei’s sixth Innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) Forum, held in Beijing this month, saw experts in innovation and intellectual property from around the world gather to explore the importance of openness and IP protection in driving innovation and social progress.

At the forum, Huawei Chief Legal Officer Song Liuping emphasised during his opening address that Huawei is fully committed to an open approach to innovation.

“Open innovation drives society and technology forward, and it's in our DNA,” said Song. “Huawei respects the IP of others, and protects its own, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.”

Song added that while Huawei's patent licensing revenue in 2024 was approximately US$630 million, the patent royalties that Huawei has paid over the years are nearly three times the amount of royalties received.

Alan Fan, Vice President and Head of the Intellectual Property Rights Department at Huawei

Meanwhile, Alan Fan, Vice President and Head of the Intellectual Property Rights Department at Huawei, said in his keynote address that, as a leading contributor to technology in the ICT sector, Huawei shares its technologies through open-source software, open hardware, patent filings, standard contributions, and academic papers.

In 2024, Fan said, Huawei published 37,000 patents, setting a new record for the company. In addition, Huawei submitted more than 10,000 technical contributions to standards organizations, and published over 1,000 academic papers. Meanwhile, the source code for OpenHarmony grew by another 10 million lines, with submissions from over 8,100 community contributors, and openEuler exceeded 10 million installations.

In the cellular standard field, more than 2.7 billion 5G devices have been licensed under Huawei's patents by the end of 2024. In the Wi-Fi domain, over 1.2 billion consumer electronic devices have been licensed under Huawei's patents. And in multimedia, more than 3.2 billion multimedia devices have been licensed under the company's video codec patents. A total of 48 Fortune Global 500 companies are Huawei licensees, either directly or indirectly.

Top Ten Inventions

At the forum, Fan also unveiled the innovations that won Huawei’s sixth Top Ten Inventions award, spanning a range of business domains that are key to future development, including computing, the HarmonyOS operating system, and storage.

Topping the list this year was Huawei’s recently launched scale-up ultra-large scale SuperPoD system, based on the company’s UnifiedBus protocol, which delivers a number of notable new features, including strong resource pooling, scaling, and long-term stability. This supernode architecture enables high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnection between computing and data storage units, while its unified protocols and memory addressing allow effective compute to scale linearly with the cluster scale, which ultimately improves cluster reliability.

At a media roundtable immediately after the event, Song explained that the Top 10 inventions are evaluated “based on their patent values, the creativity and novelty of the technologies, as well as the corresponding market value”, not simply their commercial value.

He added that the top inventions are typically not a single technology but a complex combination of multiple technologies, like chipsets, software and connectivity, which is where creativity and novelty come into play.

Regarding the SuperPoD system, Fan said that Huawei plans to licence the UnifiedBus specs under its patents system.

“Our supernode basically creates pools to pull all kinds of hardware resources, like processors, memory and others – the UnifiedBus connects all of these hardware resources,” Fan explained. “We do have a plan to open up the UnifiedBus specs so our partners can develop their own hardware that can talk to this unified bus.”

Balancing openness and IPR protection

The theme of this year’s forum, “Advancing Innovation with Openness”, explored not only the importance of openness to driving innovation, but also the challenge of protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) within that spirit of openness.

During the roundtable, Fan explained that even in the open-source domain, where code is open to everyone, IP protections like copyright, licenses, and technical/trade secrets are still needed to protect the entire ecosystem, not just a patent-holder’s individual IP.

“If someone outside that ecosystem wants to replicate the code, he can still do so, but he's not able to replicate the entire ecosystem, given the existing protection through the patent,” Fan said.

Song added that Huawei’s overall strategy towards open source is about active participation and support. “We have joined a lot of open-source organizations. We also open-source our system to those ecosystems. Huawei is a company who is product and service oriented.”

Song observed that balancing open source with IPR is not unlike the work of standardization in industry sectors such as telecoms, where the objective is interoperability, which requires a certain level of openness even among direct competitors.

“The various parties follow the principle of open, transparency, cooperation and non-discrimination to realize the cooperative goals of that particular industry,” Song said. “When it comes to competition, various vendors, they develop their own products and solutions to better serve their customers, so they compete against each other in terms of the cost effectiveness, efficiency and advanced technologies of their products and solutions.”

Song reiterated that Huawei is committed to building an environment that protects innovation and IP and working closely with industry partners to promote constructive IP protection.

“This way, members of the industry can continue to grow and develop together,” he said.