According to the result of a recent search on the official website of ETSI (an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the telecommunications industry, which has 457 members from 47 countries, including telecommunications administrations, national standards organizations, network carriers, equipment manufacturers, dedicated network service providers, and user research bodies; a member of 3GPP), by June 14, 2018, 10 enterprises including Huawei, Ericsson, Samsung, Sharp, and Intel have declared 5,401 families of 5G standard patents.

The cumulative number of declared standard patents in the 5G NR field has reached 5,124 (See Table 1). Based on the holders of declared 5G standard patents, patentees that hold over 1,000 families of 5G NR standard patents are: Huawei, Ericsson, and Samsung, among which Huawei ranks the first with 1,481 declared patents (28.90%), Ericsson ranks the second with 1,134 declared patents (22.13%), and Samsung ranks the third with1,038 declared patents (20.26%).

Table 1: 5G NR declared standard patent statistics

In the 5G new core network field (See Table 2), only three enterprises (Huawei, LG, and ETRI) hold totally 277 families of standard patents at present, among which Huawei ranks the first with 214 declared patents (77.26%), LG ranks the second with 49 declared patents (17.69%), and ETRI ranks the third with14 declared patents (5.05%).

Table 2: New core network declared standard patent statistics Company Number of Patent

Above 5G standard patent statistics disclosed by ETSI objectively indicate that 5G standard patents are mainly held by a few enterprises like Huawei and Ericsson, which have attached continuous importance, made enormous investments, and been committed to innovation. Enterprises can have the say in the 5G era only by sticking to innovation and by strengthening their accumulation of independent intellectual property rights.