Huawei said its 2024 R&D investment reached CNY170 billion ($24 billion), representing roughly 21% of total revenue
In sum – what to know:
Huawei’s patent revenue hit $630 million in 2024 – Licensing covered billions of 5G, Wi-Fi, and multimedia devices globally, underlining the company’s influence in essential connectivity standards.
Huawei invested CNY170 billion in R&D last year – Equivalent to 21% of revenue, placing Huawei among the world’s top six R&D spenders according to the EU Industrial R&D Scoreboard.
Open innovation ecosystem expanded rapidly – With 37,000 new patents and major open-source projects like OpenHarmony and OpenEuler, Huawei deepened collaboration with global developers and partners.
Chinese vendor Huawei revealed that it generated $630 million in patent licensing revenue during 2024.
The figures were shared at the company’s sixth annual Innovation and IP Forum, which took place in Beijing, China, this week.
Alan Fan, head of Huawei’s intellectual property rights department, noted that the company had published nearly 37,000 patents in 2024, bringing its total active global patents to more than 150,000. “In 2024, we published almost 37,000 patent applications, a new record high. As of last year, in the cellular standard field, more than 2.7 billion 5G devices have been licensed under our patents. In the Wi-Fi field, over 1.2 billion consumer electronic devices have been licensed under our patents. And in multimedia, more than 3.2 billion multimedia devices have been licensed under our video codec patents,” the executive said.
Fan also highlighted the vendor’s approach of openness and collaboration across multiple technology domains: “Through open source, open hardware, and public cloud services, millions of developers, partners, and customers around the world can build their own software and hardware products using Huawei’s technologies.”
Beyond open-source contributions, the executive also noted that the company remains a key contributor to global technology standards, having submitted more than 10,000 technical contributions and published over 1,000 academic papers in the past year.
“Patent licensing helps the industry jointly invests in standardization, and licensing is often an industry collaboration itself,” he said. Huawei now has 233 patent license agreements, with 95% achieved through amicable negotiations. “We have pursued judicial enforcement sparingly, viewing it as a last resort,” Fan added.
Huawei’s 2024 R&D investment reached CNY170 billion ($24 billion), representing roughly 21% of total revenue.
The Chinese company claimed to have the largest number of granted patents in China, with over 50,000 valid patents. Huawei also noted it has more than 29,000 granted patents in the United States and more than 19,000 granted patents in Europe. In the past three years, Huawei has signed or renewed cross-licensing agreements with major international vendors such as Nokia, Ericsson, Amazon, Samsung, and Sharp.
The vendor reported a decline in profit for the first half of 2025, as the company continued to allocate resources into research and development.
Net profit fell 32% year-on-year to CNY 37 billion ($5.17 billion) for the first half of the year, while revenues rose 4% to CNY 427 billion, marking its strongest first-half revenue since 2020.
