One of the world’s largest patent holders on Advancing innovation with openness

NguyenVuong
March 5, 2026

One of the world’s largest patent holders on Advancing innovation with openness

When Huawei filed its first patent application in 1995, few could have anticipated that three decades later the company would hold more than 150,000 active patents worldwide—approximately a third in China, more than 29,000 in the United States, and over 19,000 in Europe.

These milestones formed the backdrop to Huawei’s sixth Innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) Forum held in November 2025, where experts gathered to discuss openness and IP protection as drivers of innovation and broader social progress.

The event also announced the winners of Huawei’s biennial ‘Top Ten Inventions’ awards, highlighting patented technologies with strong commercial potential as the company continues to champion innovation and intellectual property in communications technology and industrial digital transformation.

Powering the future

Huawei has become one of the world’s largest patent holders by consistently investing in research and development, directing more than 10% of annual revenue to R&D—rising to around 20% in the past four years.

“Open innovation drives society and technology forward, and it’s in our DNA,” says Huawei’s chief legal officer, Liuping Song.

Over the past decade, cumulative R&D expenditure has surpassed $176 billion, placing Huawei among the top six global companies for R&D spending for eight consecutive years according to the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard.

Huawei earns substantial patent licensing revenue—totaling $630 million in 2024—but has historically paid three times more in royalties to other companies, reflecting the patent-intensive sectors in which it operates. Today, 48 Fortune Global 500 companies are either direct or indirect licensees, and as part of its broader IP and technology strategy, Huawei has also signed or renewed cross-licensing agreements with global vendors Nokia, Amazon, and Samsung.

“Huawei respects the IP of others, and protects its own, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets,” says Song, adding that by building by working closely with industry partners in an environment that prioritizes innovation and IP, “members of the industry can continue to grow and develop together.”

Engineering progress

The Huawei Innovation and IP Forum 2025 brought together experts and industry figures to discuss how intellectual property can guide future technological development.

This year’s ‘Top Ten Inventions’ award—chosen, as Song explains, “based on their patent values, the creativity and novelty of the technologies, as well as the corresponding market value”—recognized one of Huawei’s newest hardware innovations: its new form factors for foldables.

The award spotlighted advances in precision hinges, flexible screens, cooling systems, and structural engineering—the technologies behind the world’s first commercially available tri-fold smartphone capable of folding both inward and outward while maintaining a slim 3.6-mm (0.14-in) profile. Introduced internationally in February 2025, the Huawei Mate XT became the first tri-fold smartphone to offer seamless transitions between single, dual, and triple-screen modes.

These innovations are also reflected in the company’s broader hardware lineup, including the MateBook Fold—Huawei’s first foldable PC—which folds a single 18-inch OLED screen into a 13-inch display with a digital keyboard, weighing 1.16 kg (2.56 lb) and measuring 7.3 mm (0.29 in) when fully opened.

A pioneering vision

Huawei’s commitment to innovation also extends to photography, including the multispectral Ultra Chroma Camera, which also received a ‘Top Ten Inventions’ award at Huawei’s 2025 Innovation and IP Forum.

Unlike conventional smartphone cameras that rely on three RGB channels, the Ultra Chroma Camera applies 1.5 million spectral channels, enabling a reported improvement in color accuracy of up to 120%.Using advanced color-restoration algorithms, the system captures detailed spectral information from the environment and processes it to render color that appears more true to life.

These capabilities are showcased in the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra, which achieved the highest DXOMARK Camera score to date— exemplifying how long-term investments in optics, color science, and computational photography continue to shape new benchmarks in mobile imaging.

Huawei celebrates photographic excellence through its annual XMAGE awards. ‘Ethereal Lines’, XMAGE Grand Prize winner.
Gheorghe Popa/Huawei XMAGE Awards 20255

Huawei’s sustained commitment to innovation, supported by long-term R&D investment and a strong IP strategy, continues to shape advances across communications, hardware, and imaging. As the company expands its collaborations and technology ecosystem, it continues to look ahead toward its vision for a more open, connected, and intelligent future.