China’s technology landscape has expanded at a remarkable pace, and Huawei sits at the center of that growth. Its intellectual property portfolio touches thousands of global standards and underpins billions of devices across consumer, industrial, and automotive sectors. According to Alan Fan, the company’s IP philosophy is built on two pillars: contributing to international standard-setting bodies and protecting the high-value technologies inside its products.
Explore how Huawei’s intellectual property fuels one of the world’s most advanced technology ecosystems - from flagship foldable devices to EV intelligence and industrial systems. Learn how tens of thousands of yearly patents, standards contributions, and new AI-era protections shape the company’s competitiveness and influence billions of connected products.
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Narrator:
China is home to one of the most ambitious technology ecosystems in the world and few companies illustrate that scale more than Huawei, a company whose intellectual property now touches thousands of standards, billions of devices, and entire industries.
Alan Fan:
Huawei filed something like 37,000 patents last year, part of our patents are meant to cover the contributions that we made to standard setting bodies. Everybody can use these standards, and we license them, but we license them under very reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. There are also patents that we file to protect our own products. These patents are not for licensing. These are for protecting the company's competitiveness.
Narrator:
It's a world where data, training sets, and model architecture matter as much as hardware and algorithms, and increasingly, those innovations show up in Huawei's consumer products.
Steve Saunders:
Okay. So we're inside Huawei's flagship store in Beijing and this is where the end product of so many of its patents end up being applied, inside these mobile devices. In particular, its, really, landmark trifold Mate XTs[Z1] phone, which is the first commercially available trifold phone in the world and has helped propel Huawei to its number one position in the Chinese market. It is quite expensive. The cheapest version of this one is $2,800, and yet it is constantly sold out, so obviously people are prepared to pay for the quality.
Narrator:
But Huawei's intellectual property doesn't stop at phones. China's electric vehicle industry, the largest and fastest-growing in the world, has become a major platform for Huawei's software and systems.
Steve Saunders:
Okay. It's time to go for a little drive in one of China's famous EVs. This one's made by AITO. Beautiful looking machine. AITO is actually one of over 200 manufacturers of EVs in China, and they're really good value here. An average EV in China goes for about $28,000, compared to $60,000 in North America.
And just because they're low price doesn't mean that they're low spec. Actually, most Chinese EVs come with a remarkable amount of bits and pieces. One of them actually comes with a drone, and that one costs $28,000. My EV Hummer, which I bought last year, cost four times as much as that car. Does it come with a drone? No. No, it does not.
Narrator:
HarmonyOS, a unified operating system, connects the entire ecosystem.
Steve Saunders:
The interesting thing about Harmony is, as the name suggests, it's not just for cars, it's for all of the devices, so you might find the same HarmonyOS on a digger at the bottom of a mine or on some sort of transportation system. That's really important, actually, because by doing that, it opens up the opportunity, perhaps, to integrate IT and OT industrial environments for the first time on the same OS. But right now, we're just getting to enjoy all of these very high-end and sophisticated features here, which are all packaged into the car. So Huawei doesn't do the car, but it sort of does the car's brain, which is, obviously, a specialist area. But with over 200 EV manufacturers in China, it's also a very lucrative market.
Narrator:
Huawei's patent system is built on two pillars, contributions to international standards and high value protection of internal technologies. But the rise of artificial intelligence has forced the company to rethink its approach.
Alan Fan:
AI is pretty different, for example, from telecommunication technologies like 5G. There is no such standard, so companies would build their own chips, train their own models, and there will be algorithms, and algorithms are sometimes actual ideas. And so the competitiveness of AI products, many times, comes from the substance, the content, or the data.
Narrator:
From tens of thousands of patents a year to flagship devices and intelligent vehicles, Huawei's intellectual property strategy is no longer simply administrative, it's a core engine driving the company's future. As industry 4.0, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence expand, the reach of that IP, already inside billions of devices, is only set to accelerate.