Evaluation of LTE essential patents
declared to ETSI ～Summary～
Version 2.0

1 Objectives of this survey
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the precursor technology for the 4 t h generation mobilecommunication services, which succeeds the 3 r d generation services that are now widelyused. In Japan, NTT DOCOMO launched its LTE service in December, 2010, under the nameof Xi (pronounced “Crossy”). Other companies have started their services as well, or haveannounced their service release in the near future.
As for the 3 r d generation mobile communication systems, mobile carriers adopted
different technical standards for their networks, resulting in incompatibility problems. LTE
is to be used as a single international standard for the 4 t h generation mobile services andremedy these problems. Standardization of LTE, like W-CDMA, has been being carried out
in 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project). 3GPP is an international standards
development project organized by the standards developing organizations in various
countries, such as ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in Europe andARIB (Association of Radio Industries and Businesses) in Japan.
Telecom companies may acquire patents related to the forthcoming standards. In order
for a patented technology to be adopted in standards, its holder has to declare to theorganizations in respective country their willingness to make its licenses available to allthird parties under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. This paper
aims to evaluate the “patenting power” of participating companies by studying thosepatents (including patent applications) that are declared to ETSI as being essential to LTE
standards.
Although ETSI is a European organization, not only European companies but many nonEuropean ones have declared LTE-essential patents to ETSI, because Europe has long beena large telecom market and has fostered many prominent companies. As such, the number ofpatents, declared to ETSI, held by each company should be an important indicator of thecompany’s “patenting power.”
To evaluate true “patenting power”, the number of LTE-essential patents, as have been
declared to and listed by ETSI, is not a good measure, due to the following two reasons.
-Duplicate count of patentsETSI list contains multiple patents that share a common priority, such as provisional
applications in the U.S., divisional applications, or applications to other countries.
Divisional applications, which have different scopes, may well be counted separately.
Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
1Copyright(c)2012 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

1. Objectives of the survey
But, in most cases, it is more appropriate to count the related patents as a single
patent family.
-Difference in declaration policy of each company
According to ETSI policy, companies can declare essential patents at their discretion.
ETSI does not confirm or deny that the declared patents are really essential. As a result,the definition of relevance to the standard varies, resulting in considerable difference inthe number of the declared patents.
Therefore, this survey estimates the number of truly “essential” patents held by eachcompany, taking the following processes:- to identify effective number of declared patents by grouping related patents into a family,- to select patents to be evaluated from all the declared patents,- to estimate essentiality ratio (the percentage of standard-relevant patents within all theevaluated patents for each company, and- to derive the gross number of essential patents, for each company, by multiplying thenumber of declared patents by the essentiality ratio.
This survey is an updated version of the previous report and is based on the information
obtained from the latest ETSI declaration list.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2012 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

22.Major survey results

2 Major survey results
The main results of this survey are as follows:i)

The original list of essential patents notified to ETSI (original list) was obtained fromthe ETSI website. By extracting only relevant patents from the list and grouping theminto patent families, a total of 5,013 patents were identified to be subject to this study.
This is the effective number of declared patents. The number of companies that madedeclarations was 43.

ii)

Samsung has the largest number of declared patents (612, 12.2%) and is followed byQualcomm (544, 10.9％ ), Huawei (527, 10.5%), Nokia (464, 9.3%), InterDigital (382,7.6％ ), ZTE (352, 7.2％ ), Ericsson (352,7.0%), and CATT (265, 5.3%). In the present
survey, CATT newly came in the ranking as one of major companies. Declarations are
not limited to major companies, but are evenly distributed among many companies. The
nationalities of the companies are also evenly distributed among USA, Europe and Asia.

iii) Many of the declared patents had been filed after 2005, when LTE standardization
work began. In particular, the applications filed between 2006 and 2009 are dominant,and the number of declarations made on the applications filed between 1999 and 2004
are also significant. The majority of patents subject to the current survey are those
filed in 2009 and 2010.
iv) Companies can be classified into four types, namely, a) those who have declared patents
filed during a long period of time from the early days (around 1990) to now, b) those
who have declared patents filed mainly after 2005 (the year when LTE standardizationstarted), c) those who have declared patents filed earlier times, but not after 2005, andd) those who do not fall into any of the above categories.
v)

The countries, where the applications were filed with, were surveyed. Qualcomm,Ericsson, InterDigital, Motorola and Nokia have been filing their applications withvarious countries in the world. Japanese and Korean companies have also been filingthere applications evenly among BRICs and other countries.

vi) Essentiality has been determined for each patent selected, for evaluation, from 5,013
patents. It has been estimated that 58% of them are truly “essential”, conforming toETSI standards. With ZTE, NTT DOCOMO NEC, InnovativeSonic, HTC, and RIM, morethan 80% of their evaluated patents are identified to be “essential.”vii) Legal statuses of evaluated patents in respective application countries have beenstudied. The results show that Motorola scores the highest registration ratio of overEvaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2012 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2.Major survey results
70%. Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, and Sharp each scores over 50%, Huawei and Samsung
each scores under 10%, and ZTE has no patents legally examined yet. This means thatevaluations on Motorola have been done mostly based on claims of registered ones,whereas evaluations on ZTE have been done based on unexamined ones.
viii) The numbers of “essential” patents have been derived by multiplying the numbers ofdeclared patents by the essentiality ratios. When the ratios are determined based on all
the evaluated patents , ZTE is estimated to have the largest number of “essential”
patents (311) followed by Qualcomm (297), Samsung (296), Nokia (273), Huawei (257),
NTT DOCOMO (206), LG (196), InterDigital (193), Ericsson (180), and CATT (152).
Regarding companies such as ZTE and Huawei who have many unregistered patents,
those numbers may be reduced because of the possible decline of the essentiality ratio
during the course of legal examinations.
ix) When the essentiality ratios are determined based on registered patents, Qualcomm
owns the largest number of “essential” patents (260), followed by Nokia(230),Huawei(226), NTT DOCOMO and Samsung(204 each), ZTE(195), Ericsson(156),CATT(144), LG(139), and InterDigital(127). It should be noted that evaluation samples
are small with non-negligible number of companies, and accumulation of samples areimportant for the future.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c)2012 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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