Cyber Creative Institute Co. Ltd.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents
declared to ETSI
Version 3.0

June 2013Table of contents
1. Objectives. ............................................................................................................................. 1
2. Survey results ........................................................................................................................ 3
2.1 Identifying the patents subject to analysis ........................................................................... 3
2.2 ETSI declaration trends ....................................................................................................... 5(1) Number of patents declared by each company ........................................................................ 5(2) Breakdown by application year ............................................................................................ 10(3) Breakdown by company and application year ........................................................................ 11(4) Breakdown by application country ....................................................................................... 13(5) Breakdown by company and application country ................................................................... 14
2.3 Evaluation of essentiality to standards ................................................................................ 16(1) Evaluation method ............................................................................................................... 16(2) Selection of patents for evaluation ....................................................................................... 17(3) Essentiality evaluation results ............................................................................................ 19(4) Evaluation results for each company .................................................................................... 20(5) Essentiality ratios based on all the evaluated patents .......................................................... 21(6) Registration ratios of evaluated patents ............................................................................... 22(7) Essentiality ratios based on registered patents .................................................................... 23
3. Estimation of the gross numbers of essential patents ............................................................. 25
4. Summary .............................................................................................................................. 29
References ................................................................................................................................ 31

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

Evaluation of LTE essential patents
declared to ETSI
Version 3.0

1 Objectives
Mobile communication service is migrating from the third generation (3G) to LTE (LongTerm Evolution) rapidly. In Japan, NTT DOCOMO launched the first LTE service in Japan,
in December 2010, under the name of Xi (pronounced “Crossy”). The number of Xi
subscribers exceeded 12 million as of April 2013.
In contrast, the number of subscribers of FOMA, a 3G service, declined below 60 million
and decreasing. It shows that the migration to LTE is in progress.
In April 2012, ITU-R (Radio communication Sector of International Telecommunication
Union) recommended two technologies as standards for the fourth generation mobile
communication (IMT-Advanced), i.e., LTE-Advanced and WiMAX2 1 . Of the two technologies,
LTE-Advanced allows for the use of telecommunications services of high-speed, largecapacity, while maintaining compatibility with the current LTE, and is expected to be usedwidely in the future. NTT DOCOMO plans to start its commercial service in 2015 in Japan.
Standard specifications for LTE-Advanced and LTE have been being carried out in the
Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which is an international standards
development project organized by the standards developing organizations 2 in various
countries. Keeping pace with the standardization activities, a number of patents have been
filed by companies involved in the standardization. For a patented technology to be adopted
in standards, its holder has to declare 3 to the organizations, in relevant countries, its
willingness to make its licenses available to all third parties under fair, reasonable andnon-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
This paper evaluates the number of patents that are essential to LTE and LTE-Advanced
standards based on the patents declared to ETSI.
Although ETSI is a European standards developing organization, not only European
WirelessMAN-Advanced: IEEE 802.16m regulation that IEE has been considering, and developed
WiMAX (IEEE 802.16a) and mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e).
2 Major standards developing organizations are included as follows:
ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in Europe, and ARIB (Association of Radio
Industries and Businesses) in Japan.
3 When declaring an essential patent to standards developing organizations such as ETSI or ARIB, theholder is requested to choose one of the following three licensing options:(1) Grant licenses free of charge (or disclaim patent rights)(2) Grant licenses to other parties on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions.
(3) Others (choose neither of the above)
The second option above is called the FRAND condition.
1

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11. Objectives
companies but many non-European ones have declared their patents as essential to LTE.
This is because Europe has long been a large telecom market and has fostered many
prominent companies. As such, the number of patents declared to ETSI, by participatingcompanies, should be an important indicator of the company’s “IPR 4 power.”ETSI discloses the list of patents that have been declared, by member companies, asessential to LTE standards. To evaluate true “IPR power”, however, simply counting thenumber of declared patents, as listed in the ETSI list, is not a good measure, due to thefollowing two reasons.
-Duplication of the same invention
ETSI list contains multiple patents that share a common priority, such as provisional
applications in the U.S., divisional applications, or applications to other countries. Withdivisional applications, those, which have different scopes, may well be counted
separately. But, in most cases, it is more appropriate to count them as a single patentfamily.

-Difference in company’s criteria for declaration
According to ETSI policy, companies can declare essential patents at their discretion.
ETSI does not confirm or deny whether the declared patents are really essential or not.
As a result, the definition of relevance to the standard varies, resulting in considerable
differences in the number of the declared patents.

In order to cope with these difficulties, this survey, first, sorts out the ETSI list, bygrouping the patents on a patent family basis, to derive the effective set of declared patents
to be used for evaluation. It, then, evaluates the resulting set based on common criteria todetermine the number of truly essential patents.
This survey is done based on the patents contained in the latest ETSI declaration list
and is an update to our previous report 5 .

IPR: intellectual property right
Evaluation of “LTE essential patents declared to ETSI” Version 1.0
Evaluation of “LTE essential patents declared to ETSI” Version 2.0（ Refer to http://www.cybersoken.com/research/lte.html）

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Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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22. Survey results

2 Survey results
2.1 Identifying the patents subject to analysis
The list of patents under current study (hereinafter called as “original list”) is the one
uploaded by ETSI in November, 2012, which is available from the ETSI website 6 .
The original list simply lists the patents notified by companies as provided, and is notsuitable for the meaningful comparison of the numbers of patents held by companies. The
reasons for this are as follows:- A group of patents, that have been derived from a single invention or applied indifferent countries, are listed as separate entries, and- Undisclosed patents, such as provisional applications 7 in the U.S., are included in thelist.
To identify the relevant patents (including patent applications 8 ) for our analysis, wehave consolidated the inter-related patents into one entity on a patent-family-basis, andproduced a list of independent patents.
Concrete procedures are as follows:(a) Extracting only those patents that- contains the term “LTE” or “SAE” in the “Essential to projects” column, or- contains the term “TS36”, “TS24.301”, “TS23.401”, “TS23.272”, or “TS33.401” in the“Essential to standards YES to ETSI FRAND license” column, provided that the term
“3GPP” is contained in the “Essential to projects” column.
(b) Leaving only one patent among those that have common application number or
publication number.
(c) Deleting the patents that had not been published by the end of November, 2012 (orfiled by the end of May, 2011).

http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_sr/000300_000399/000314/
A “provisional application” is an application made on the assumption that a formal patent application
will be made at a later time. It was introduced in the U.S. in 1995 in order to entitle inventors to theright of priority for national patent. In the provisional application system, formal patent claims are notrequired because there is no intention to claim any patent rights. In order to mature it into an issued
patent the applicant must file or request a formal patent application within one year. Otherwise, theprovisional application is considered to have been abandoned.
8 Not only registered patents but also patent applications are studied in this survey to set the proper
scope of work. In a legal sense, “patents”, as stated in the title of this paper, legally refer only to thosealready registered.
67

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3

2. Survey results(d) Identifying the patent family for each patent obtained by the above processes of (a) to(c), using a commercial patent database 9 .
(e) Determining a representative patent, for each patent family, that represents themember patents in the family.
By applying the above procedures, 5,919 patents, or patent families to be exact, havebeen identified as the subjects for our evaluation.

PatBase was used for this purpose. PatBase is a commercial patent database that was co-developed by
RWS and Minesoft in UK.
In PatBase, patents are grouped into families if they contain one or more common priorities with otherpatent(s).In this study, those patents that have the same Family Number (FN) and the same Priority
Number corresponding to the Earliest Priority Date are regarded to form a family and they are treatedas one, where the Priority Number includes a VLF (Very Large Family) number. VLF (Very Large Family)
number refers to the identification number given to a certain portion of a large family (with more than
130 patents) to indicate that it is a portion of the family that has been split.

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Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results
2.2 ETSI declaration trends(1) Number of patents declared by each company
Figure 1 shows the number of patents (counted on a patent-family-basis; the same
applies hereafter) declared by each company for each year. Declaration years are taken fromthe “Declaration Dates” column in the list. If “ D eclaration Date” includes multiple dates,
the earliest one is taken. The names of the declaring companies are taken from the“Declaring Companies” column and translated to effective company names, as shown in
Table 1. Related company names are aggregated to a corresponding effective name. A totalof 49 companies have been identified.
Some of the companies started their declarations as early as 2007 when the standards
were still being developed. However, on the whole, the number of declaring companies
started increasing after 2009 when standards were fixed and the commercial developments
got into full swing. Around that time, the numbers of patents declared by each company also
sharply increased. Samsung, Huawei, LG, NEC, and TI increased their declarations in 2011.
Sharp, InnvativeSonic, HTC, and CATT newly came in the list in 2011, and Pantech newly
came in the list in 2012.
Apple and Sharp are worth noting. Figure 1 shows that Apple declared in 2008, 2011
and 2012. The declarations in 2008 were the ones that Nortel declared at that year, which
Apple obtained from Nortel and re-declared in 2012. In effect, Apple made its firstdeclarations in 2012. Apple has a relatively large number of declarations (total of 78).
Sharp also made a remarkable number of declarations in recent years (189 in two years of2011 and 2012).
Most of the top companies (those that have made more than 100 declarations, except for
CATT, InterDigital, and Panasonic) declared in 2012, and are expected to continue theirdeclarations for the future.
There seems to be two reasons for these companies to take their actions. One is that
FRAND-based patent declarations are mandatory for the patents to be used in thestandards. The other is that the companies, by doing so, intend to show their strategic IPRpower to the public.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results

Figure 1 – Declared numbers of patents by company

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results
Table 1 – Declaring companies
Effective
Company Name
Airbiquity

Name in “Declaring companies” column
Airbiquity Incorporated

Country
Code 1 0
US

ALCATEL-LUCENT
Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell Co., Ltd

FR

ALCATEL-LUCENT|Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell Co., Ltd
Andrew LLC
Apple

Andrew LLC
Apple Inc.
Nortel Networks Ltd|Apple Inc.

US
US

AT&T

AT&T

Broadcom

US

BROADCOM CORPORATION

US

CATT

China Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT)CN

Deutsche Telekom AG
DeutscheTelekom

Telekom Deutschland GmbH
Telekom Deutschland GmbH|TIP Communications LLC|Research in
Motion Limited

DE

Ericsson AB
EricssonTelefonaktiebolaget LM EricssonSE

Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson|Research in Motion Limited
ETRI
FranceTelecom

ETRI

KR

France Telecom
France Telecom|TDF SAS

FRFreescaleFreescale Semiconductor Inc.

US

GemplusGemplus SA

FR

HP

Hewlett-Packard, Centre de Competences France

FR

HTC

HTC Corporation

TW

Huawei

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

CN

iCODINGiCODING Technology Inc.

US

III

Institute for Information Industry

TW

Infineon

INFINEON TECHNOLOGIESDEInnovativeSonic
Intel
InterDigital

Innovative Sonic Corporation
Innovative Sonic Ltd.
Intel Corporation
InterDigital Patent Holdings Inc.
InterDigital Technology Corp.

TW
US
US

IPR Licensing

IPR Licensing Inc.

US

Koninklijke

Koninklijke KPN N.V.

NL

LG

LG Electronics Inc.
LG Electronics Inc.|Qualcomm Incorporated

KR

1 0 Country names are the nationality of the location of corporate headquarters. Their abbreviations areshown below:
US: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA、 FR: FRANCE、 CN: CHINA、 DE: GERMANY、
SE: SWEDEN、 KR: KOREA、 TW: TWIWAN、 NL: NETHERLANDS、 BM: BERMUDA、
FI: FINLAND、 CA: CANADA、 JP: JAPAN、 UK: UNITED KINGDOM

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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2. Survey results
Marvell

Marvell Switzerland S.A.R.L

BM

MOTOROLA Inc
Motorola

MOTOROLA Inc|Motorola Mobility Inc.

US

Motorola Mobility Inc.
NEC

NEC CorporationJPNOKIA Corporation
Nokia CorpNOKIA Corporation|Motorola Mobility Inc.
NOKIA Corporation|Qualcomm Incorporated

FI

NOKIA MOBILE PHONES|NOKIA Corporation
NOKIA Corporation|Nokia Siemens Networks Oy
Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG

Nokia Siemens

Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG|NOKIA Corporation|Nokia
Siemens Networks Oy
Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG|Nokia Siemens Networks Oy

FINokia Siemens Networks Oy
Siemens AG|Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG|Nokia Siemens
Networks Oy
NortelNortel Networks Ltd

CA

NTT DOCOMONTT DOCOMO, INC

JP

Panasonic

Panasonic Corporation

JP

PantechPantech Co., Ltd

KR

PicoChip

PicoChip Limited

UK

Qualcomm

Qualcomm Incorporated

US

RenesasRenesas Mobile Corporation

JP

RIM

Research in Motion Limited
Nortel Networks Ltd|Research in Motion Limited

CA

Samsung

Samsung Electronics Co, LTD

KR

Sharp

Sharp Corporation

JP

Siemens

Siemens AG

DE

Sony

Sony Corporation

JP

Telecom Italia

TELECOM ITALIA S.p.A.

IT

TI

Texas Instruments Inc.

US

TruePosition

TruePosition Inc.

US

VoiceAge

VoiceAge Corporation

CN

VirnetX

VirnetX, Inc.

US

ZTE

ZTE Corporation

CN

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Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results
Figure 2 shows the numbers and percentages of declared patents. The companies withno less than five declarations are shown.
Qualcomm has the largest percentage (about 11%) and is followed by Samsung, Huawei,
and Nokia. The figure shows that the declarations are not just limited to a few particularcompanies but many companies, including Asian companies, have made fairly comparable
numbers of declarations.

Nortel21 (0.4%)
Siemens
26 (0.4%)
RIM
Pantech31(0.5%)
42 (0.7%)
InnovativeSonic
44 (0.7%) HTC
44 (0.7%)
ETRI
51 (0.9%)

Freescale IPR Licensing
Sony
Intel
General Dynamics
16 (0.3%) 15 (0.3%) 14 (0.2%)
13 (0.2%)
12 (0.2%)
Marvell
Andrew LLC
12 (0.2%)
8 (0.1%)
DeutscheTelekom
7 (0.1%)
Airbiquity
5 (0.1%)
Qualcomm
655 (11.1%)

Alcatel-Lucent
62 (1.0%)NECApple
78 (1.3%) 101 (1.7%)
Panasonic
107 ( 1.8%)
Nokia Siemens
107 (1.8%)
TI
125 (2.1%)
Sharp
189 (3.2%)

Samsung
652 (11.0%)
NTT DOCOMO
264 (4.5%)
CATT
273 (4.6%)
Motorola
310 (5.2%)
LG
Ericsson317 (5.4%) 399 (6.7%)
ZTE
368 (6.2%)

Huawei603 (10.2%)
Nokia Corp
505 (8.5%)

InterDigital
418 (7.1%)

Total number of Declared Patents: 5,919（Family basis）

Figure 2 – Numbers and Percentages of declared patents by company

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2. Survey results(2) Breakdown by application year
Figure 3 shows the numbers of declared patents filed for each year. The horizontal axis
shows the earliest priority year (i.e. the year when the application of particular invention
was filed for the first time, irrespective of the country it was filed) and the vertical axis
shows the number of declared patents (total of all companies’ patents).
(a) A good proportion of declared patents were filed after 2005, the year when LTE
standardization activities began. Especially, those that were filed between 2007 and2009 are significant. It is remarkable that declarations have been made actively evenafter the first version of LTE standards was released in March, 2008. It is likely thatthese declared patents are to cover the technologies required with the subsequent
revisions of the standards.
(b) The patent applications filed in 2011 have been declared. Because this survey studies
only those patents that had been filed by May 2011, it is likely that the number ofpatens filed in 2010 and 2011 may increase in the future.

1,200
1,033
1,017
925

Number of Declared Patents

1,000
800

654

620

600
353

400
200
1

2 2 6 10 11 16 19 28 37

155 149 216
103
140 156
73 12865

083 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11
Earliest Priority Year

Figure 3 – The number of declared patents for each application year

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Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results(3) Breakdown by company and application year
Figure 4 shows the number of declared patents by company for each application year.
The horizontal axis shows the earliest priority year. The vertical axis shows the names ofthe declaring companies, and the circle size is proportional to the number of declaredpatents.
The declaring companies can be roughly grouped into three categories:(a) Companies that have declared patents that were filed over many years, from the
middle of 1990’s to the present: Qualcomm, Nokia, InterDigital, Ericsson, andMotorola.
(b) Companies that have declared patents that were filed mainly after 2005, the year
when LTE standardization work began: Samsung, Huawei, ZTE, LG, CATT, NTT
DOCOMO, Sharp, Alcatel-Lucent, HTC, InnovativeSonic, RIM, and Pantech.
(c) Companies that have declared patents whose applications were filed prior to2005 but not afterwards: Siemens, Nortel, Sony, and IPR Licensing.

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2. Survey results

Figure 4 – Analysis of application by company and application year

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results(4) Breakdown by application country
Figure 5 shows the number of declared patents for application countries. In this analysis,
we counted the number of patent applications for each application country by extracting allof patents included in each family 1 1 . The vertical axis shows the application country codes 1 2
and the horizontal axis shows the number of patents filed. The applications have been filed
in 57 countries. Those countries that have less than ten patents filed are not shown in the
figure.
The result shows that US scores the largest number, followed by Patent Cooperation
Treaty (WO 1 3 ), China (CN), European Patent Office (EP), Korea (KR), and Japan (JP). This
indicates that the patents have been filed in countries and areas where major companies
are located as well as where big mobile communication markets exist.

Detailed steps to enumerate the relevant patents are as follows:- To extract all the patents constituting each family- To determine the application country by examining the first two characters of the application number,which signifies the country code
1 2 In descending order of Figure 5, the corresponding country name and country abbreviations are as
follows:
US: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA、 WO: PATENT COOPERATION TREATY、 CN: CHINA、
EP: EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE、 KR: KOREA (REPUBLIC OF)、 JP: JAPAN、 AU: AUSTRALIA、
IN: INDIA、 TW: TAIWAN、 CA: CANADA、 DE: GERMANY、 MX: MEXICO、 AT: AUSTRIA、
RU: RUSSIAN FEDERATION、 BR: BRAZIL、 ES: SPAIN、 IL: ISRAEL、 AR: ARGENTINA、 HK: HONG
KONG、 GB: UNITED KINGDOM、 FI: FINLAND、 NO: NORWAY、 ZA: SOUTH AFRICA、 DK: DENMARK、
SG: SINGAPORE、 PT: PORTUGAL、 NZ: NEW ZEALAND、 EA: EURASIAN PATENT OFFICE、
SE: SWEDEN, ID: INDONESIA、 FR: FRANCE、 UA: UKRAINE、 MA: MOROCCO、 IT: ITALY、
MY: MALAYSIA、 AP: AFRICAN REGIONAL INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY ORGANIZATION、 PL: POLAND
1 3 A “WO patent” is an international application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) of theWorld Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Making a PCT application has the same effect as
filing the same application in all PCT member countries. WO patents are internationally unexamined
patents and only the publication before examination is made. After making the international applicationand then submitting the translated texts to the patent office in the respective country, registered patentpublication will be issued after successful completion of examinations in each country.
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Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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2. Survey results

Application Country

0
US
WO
CN
EP
KR
JP
AU
IN
TW
CA
DE
MX
AT
RU
BR
ES
IL
AR
HK
GB
FI
NO
ZA
DK
SG
PT
NZ
EA
SE
ID
FR
UA
MA
IT
MY
AP
PL

1,000

2,000

Number of Patents
3,000
4,000
5,000

1,809
1,686
1,591
1,625
1,076
908
753
660
686
484
501
261
406
212
210
210
167
151
115
109
75
58
36
26
22
20
17
15
14
13
11

3,753
3,765

6,000

4,998
4,853

5,756

7,000

8,000

6,837

Figure 5- Number of Declared Patents for Application Countries(5) Breakdown by company and application country
Figure 6 shows the breakdown by application country for major companies.
The following points are observed.
(a) Among the top ranking companies, U.S. and European companies, such as Qualcomm,Nokia, InterDigital, Ericsson, and Motorola, have been filing applications worldwide.
(b) Japanese and Korean companies’ activities are not as strong as those seen in (a) but
they have been filing applications to foreign countries in a balanced manner, including
BRICs (BR, RU, IN, CN).
(c) VirnetX (USA) has only one application in terms of the family-basis, but it holds a
relatively large number of member patents, in US, EP, and JP in particular, using
divisional applications and continuation applications. Pantech (Korea) mainly files theirapplications to WO and KR, while there are some applications to US but not to JP.

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2. Survey results

Figure 6 – Breakdown by application country and company

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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2. Survey results
2.3 Evaluation of essentiality to standards
Because patent declarations to ETSI are done voluntarily by each company, no
indications are made whether they are really essential and conforming to standards or they
are supplementary in the sense that they simply facilitate implementations. Furthermore,
the criteria to decide whether a particular patent is essential or not are up to each company,
and the decision is made based on the company’s own IPR strategy, to make the most of its
IPR assets. In addition, ETSI does not evaluate the relevance of the declared patents to thestandards. Due to these reasons, the numbers of declared patents shown in Section 2.2 do
not reflect the truly essential patents held by each company, and do not meet our survey
objectives.
To solve this difficulty, this survey evaluates the patents based on a common set ofcriteria to see their relevance to the standard specifications. By applying the objective
analysis described below, we have derived the number of truly essential patents held by
each company.

(1) Evaluation method
Evaluations have been done in the following way.
(i) For each patent family, a representative patent (a patent that represents a declaredpatent family) was identified and checked against the standards.
(ii) In selecting a representative patent, Japanese patent was preferred, followed by US
patent, and EP or WO patent (in the order of preference).
If the representative patent was a registered one, claims in the registered patent areevaluated. If it was still pending 1 4 , the latest claim at the time of evaluation was used.
In the latter case, the latest claim after amendments was obtained from respective
patent information websites 1 5 .
(iii) If a patent has multiple claims, an independent claim that has the broadest scope waschosen.
(iv) The standards to be checked against were, in principle, the ones indicated in the“Essential to standards YES to ETSI FRAND license” column of the list. However, otherstandards are also referred to for additional information.
(v) Regarding the versions of the standards for reference, in principle, Release 9 (released
at the end of March, 2010) was used regardless of the version indicated in the “Essential
to standards YES to ETSI FRAND license” column of the list. Additionally, Release 10(released at the end of March 2011 and at the end of March 2012) was also used as asupplement.
Pending means that the application is being processed in the patent office and neither decision nor
trial decision has been reached. For instance, until a trial decision of rejection is made, the applicationis pending at the patent office but, if revocation of the trial decision is launched and the patent is inlitigation, the application is not pending at the patent office (pending litigation). Furthermore, if thetrial decision of rejection is cancelled by the court decision, the application will again be pending at thepatent office.
1 5 For example in Japan, the “Review Document information Reference Menu” of Industrial Property
Digital Library; http://www.ipdl.inpit.go.jp/Tokujitu/pfwj.ipdl?N0000=118
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Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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2. Survey results(vi) Essentiality was determined by classifying a patent into one of three categories, A, B orC, according to its relevance to standards. The definitions of A, B and C are as follows:
A: The invention contained in the patent matches the standards (this category
corresponds to essential patent).
B: The invention partially matches the standards.
C: The invention does not match the standards.
Since the number of declared patents was large, we resorted to a sample evaluation
method to derive the number of essential patents. For each company, we selected sample
patents for evaluation, derived the ratio of essential patents based on the samples, andthen estimated the total number of essential patents by multiplying the total number ofdeclared patents by the obtained ratio.

(2) Selection of patents for evaluation
The patents for evaluation were selected from the list according to the following criteria:(a) As many companies as possible are to be selected, unless their declarations weremade only lately.
(b) As for companies that have made a large number of declarations, around or morethan 50 patents each are to be selected.
(c) Those patents whose specifications are written in Japanese or English are to be
selected. If those are not available, patent specifications in other languages (e.g.
Chinese) are used and evaluations are done based on their English abstracts.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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2. Survey results0
Qualcomm
Samsung
HuaweiNokia Corp
InterDigital
Ericsson
ZTE
LG
Motorola
CATT
NTT DOCOMO
Sharp
TI
Nokia Siemens
Panasonic
NEC
Apple
Alcatel‐Lucent
ETRI
HTC
InnovativeSonic
PantechRIM
Siemens
NortelIntel
Sony
Freescale
IPR Licensing
General Dynamics
Marvell
Andrew LLC
DeutscheTelekom
Airbiquity
FranceTelecom
Telecom Italia
TruePosition
VoiceAge
InfineonRenesas
AT&T
Broadcom
GemplusHP
iCODINGIII
Koninklijke
PicoChip
VirnetX

Number of Evaluated Patents
100
150

50
20

46 17

0 0

37
44
44
28

44

80
78

174
161

49
136

Number of patents
Ratio

101 38
42
48
37

250

190
184
196

62
56

31

73
71

64

43

17
11
20
0 0
13
13
12
10
00
00
5
00
1
00
00
1
2
00
1
00
1
1
00
00
1
00
00
0

38

106
29
31 97
44

60
66

16

133

27
27

200

42

98

55
95
87
83

93
92

71
33
33

100
100
100
100
100

20

40
60
Ratio of Evaluated Patents（%）

80

100

Figure 7 – Numbers and percentages of patents evaluated
In Figure 7, the bars show the numbers of patents selected for evaluation in the study,
and the line shows the ratio of the number of selected patents to the number of declaredpatents for each company. The vertical axis shows company names, while the scale at the
top shows the number of patents evaluated and the scale at the bottom shows the ratio inpercentage. In the figure, underlined numbers show the percentages and those without
underline show the number of patents evaluated.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

18

2. Survey results
For most companies listed to the upper of Panasonic, the criterion (b) applies andaround or more than 50 patents have been selected. With CATT, because the number of its
English patents was less than 50, the evaluated patents were less than 50.
A total of 2,129 patents have been evaluated, which amounted to 36.0% of the total
number of declared patents (5,919).

(3) Essentiality evaluation results
Figure 8 shows the essentiality evaluation results for all the evaluated patents. The
percentage of those scored “A”, i.e., truly essential for the standards, is 56.0%.
Although all patents studied have been declared to be essential by each company, acertain portion of them are evaluated to be “B” or “C”. The main reason for this isconsidered to lie in the difference in each company’s criteria for judging essentiality and its
declaration policy. By observing the percentage of “A”-scored patents for each company, we
should be able to see one aspect of the company’s IPR strategy.

C
15.0%

B
29.0%

A
56.0%

Number of Evaluated Patents: 2,129

A: The invention contained in the patent matches the standards (i.e.,essential patents).
B: The invention contained partially matches the standards.
C: The invention contained does not match the standards.
Figure 8 – Essentiality evaluation results

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

19

2. Survey results(4) Evaluation results for each company
Figure 9 shows the evaluation results for the 2,129 patents for each company. Most
companies have more “A”s than “B”s or “C”s. In particular, LG, ZTE, CATT, NTT DOCOMO,
NEC, HTC, InnovativeSonic, Siemens, and General Dynamics have relatively high “A”
ratios and low “C” ratios. It is reasonable to see that these companies have declared patents
based on their strict selection criteria.

Figure 9 - Essentiality evaluation results by company

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

20

2. Survey results(5) Essentiality ratios based on all the evaluated patents
Figure 10 shows the essentiality ratios (defined as the ratio of declared patents
evaluated as “A” to all the patents evaluated, called declaration-based essentiality ratio
hereafter) for each company. The horizontal axis shows the essentiality ratio (%) and thevertical axis shows the company names. Companies with less than 10 declared patents are
not shown.
Companies such as ZTE, LG, NTT DOCOMO, TI, NEC, InnovativeSonic, Siemens, andGeneral Dynamic have higher ratios (over 70%). As shown in Figure 4, one of the reasonsfor this is that these companies, except General Dynamics, have declared relatively newpatents, filed after the time LTE standardization began.
The companies, such as Apple, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Freescale, show low ratios of 40%
or less. With Apple, taking into consideration the fact that it has mainly declared thepatents obtained from Nortel, and that Nortel’s essentiality ratio indicates low level, it islikely that Apple has obtained many patens not matching with LTE standards.

0
Qualcomm
Samsung
HuaweiNokia Corp
InterDigital
Ericsson
ZTE
LG
Motorola
CATT
NTT DOCOMO
Sharp
TI
Nokia Siemens
Panasonic
NEC
Apple
Alcatel‐Lucent
ETRI
HTC
InnovativeSonic
RIM
Siemens
NortelSony
Freescale
IPR Licensing
General Dynamics

20

Essentiality Ratio (%)
40
60
43.7
45.3

80

52.6

50.5
51.5

58.9

73.2

41.9

60.6

51.3

70.0
70.3

56.3

67.9

58.8
40.0
38.5
41.7

82.1
82.6
83.2

45.0

31.8
34.1

100

81.4

72.7

53.8
70.0

Average (56.0%)

Figure 10 - Declaration-based essentiality ratio for each company

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

21

2. Survey results(6) Registration ratios of evaluated patents
In evaluating the essentiality of patents, it is important to take into account theexamination status of the patents under study, to observe the effect of possible reductions
in patent claims in the course of examination. Figure 11 shows the ratio of registeredpatents 1 6 to the total number of patents under evaluation for each company. Results areshown only for those companies that have no less than 10 patents for evaluation.
Among patents evaluated (2,129), registered patents are 1,152 with registration ratio of
54.1%. With four companies, Siemens, Sony, IPR Licensing, and General Dynamics, all of
the evaluated patents are registered ones.
Apple and Nortel’s score are close to 100%. Sharp, Panasonic, NEC, and ETRI, eachachieves the registration ratio higher than 80%. In contrast, ZTE and CATT resulted invery low ratios. Alcatel-Lucent and InnovativeSonic show a little lower score than the
average (54.1%), due to the fact that the number of registered patents was small at the timeof evaluation.
With companies whose registration ratios are high, the essentiality has been evaluatedbased mainly on registered patents and it is reasonable to assume that their essentiality
ratios would not change largely; whereas with those whose registration ratios are low, theirratios may vary as their patents are examined in the future.
0
Qualcomm
Samsung
HuaweiNokia Corp
InterDigital
Ericsson
ZTE
LG
Motorola
CATT
NTT DOCOMO
Sharp
TI
Nokia Siemens
Panasonic
NEC
Apple
Alcatel‐Lucent
ETRI
HTC
InnovativeSonic
RIM
Siemens
NortelSony
Freescale
IPR Licensing
General Dynamics

10

20

30

Registration Ratio (%)
40
50
60
40.2
39.8
36.4

15.1

70

80

90

100

51.1
55.3

40.3
69.1
72.1

4.3

64.4
60.0

80.0

66.7
81.1

40.9
46.5

85.9

97.7

81.3

64.3
70.6

76.9

100.0
95.0
100.0
100.0
100.0

Average (54.1%)

Figure 11 - Registration ratios
The numbers of patents were determined by referring to the legal statuses of the evaluated patents in
the respective application countries as of the survey period. Therefore, it should be noted that the result
does not reflect the legal status as of present nor does it reflect the legal status of the very patents as
declared to ETSI. For example, as described in Section 2.3 (1)(ii), in most of the cases, legal status isderived from Japanese patent, if a patent family includes a Japanese one, or from US patent, if thefamily does not include a Japanese one. So, even with US-based Qualcomm, about 30% of the evaluations
were based on the application filed in Japan. In the case where the evaluated were PCT patents, they
were treated as non-registered.
16

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

22

2. Survey results(7) Essentiality ratios based on registered patents
Figure 12 shows, for each company, the number of registered patents evaluated andessentiality ratio (called registration-based essentiality ratio hereafter). Registration-based
essentiality ratio pertains to the ratio of A-scored patents against the company’s all
registered patents evaluated. The line graph with scale on the bottom shows registrationbased essentiality ratios (in %). The bar graph with scale on the top shows the number ofpatents and the vertical axis shows declaring company names.
The average essentiality ratio is 53.8%.
In the figure, pink bars show companies with higher essentiality ratio, and yellow bars
show companies with lower essentiality ratio.
It is remarkable that LG, NTT DOCOMO, TI, and InnovativeSonic show highessentiality ratios while possessing a large number of registered patents evaluated. In
contrast, Samsung, Motorola, and Apple have a large numbers of registered patents
evaluated but their essentiality ratios are low.

0
Qualcomm
Samsung
HuaweiNokia Corp
InterDigital
Ericsson
ZTE
LG
Motorola
CATT
NTT DOCOMO
Sharp
TI
Nokia Siemens
Panasonic
NEC
Apple
Alcatel-Lucent
ETRI
HTC
InnovativeSonic
RIM
Siemens
NortelSony
Freescale
IPR Licensing
General Dynamics

Number of Registered Patents Evaluated
40
60
80

20

49

36

45
44

100

64

49
49 67

105
79

69

16

75

67

36

98

50

2

45

80

65
64

72

36
44

49 67

59

30
43 33

69

13

56

18
20

42

19
13
10
12
10

0

10

80

50

12
11

30
20

30

73
54

42
40

Essentiality Ratio (%)

Number of Patents
Essentiality Ratio

63

39

18

120

68
70

70
50

60

70

80

90

100

Average（53.8%）

Figure 12 - Number of registered patents and registration-based essentiality
ratios

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

23

2. Survey results
Table 2 shows, for major companies, a comparison between declaration-based andregistration-based essentiality ratios.
Among companies with a large number of registered patents evaluated, Nokia shows
rather larger decrease of registration-based essentiality ratio as compared to thedeclaration-based one. The values for CATT and ZTE show much larger decline, but theseshould be taken only as a guide because the number of registered patents evaluated is small.
In contrast, ETRI’s registration-based essentiality ratio shows an increase, but it also
should be taken only as a guide because the total number of evaluated patents is small.
LG and NTT DOCOMO are remarkable in the sense that, based on the evaluation of a
sufficient number of patents (more than 50), their registration-based essentiality ratios are
high, with marginal decline from the declaration-based essentiality ratios. TI,
InnovativeSonic, and Siemens show similar characteristics, but these should be taken only
as guides because they are based on the evaluation of a smaller number of patents.
Table 2 – Essentiality ratio of declaring companies
Essentiality Ratio (%)
Declaring Company

Declaration‐

Registration

based‐basedEssentiality Ratio (%)
Declaring Company

Declaration‐

Registration

based‐basedQualcomm

52.6

48.5

Panasonic

51.3

49.3

Samsung

43.7

35.7

NEC

70.3

63.3

Huawei

45.3

45.3

Apple

31.8

32.6

Nokia Corp

58.9

48.6

Alcatel-Lucent

34.1

38.9

InterDigital

50.5

49.3

ETRI

56.3

69.2

Ericsson

51.5

44.3

HTC

67.9

55.6

ZTE

82.1

68.8

InnovativeSonic

81.4

80.0

LG

73.2

74.6

RIM

58.8

50.0

Motorola

41.9

35.7

Siemens

72.7

72.7

CATT

82.6

50.0

Nortel40.0

42.1

NTT DOCOMO

83.2

80.0

Sony

53.8

53.8

Sharp

45.0

45.3

Freescale

38.5

30.0

TI

70.0

72.2

IPR Licensing

41.7

41.7

Nokia Siemens

60.6

59.1

General Dynamics

70.0

70.0

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

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3. Estimation of the gross numbers of essential patents

３ Estimation of the gross number of essential patents
The gross number of essential patents held by each company (on a patent family basis)has been estimated by multiplying the number of declared patents (shown in Figure 1) by
the essentiality ratio (shown in Figure 12).
Figure 13 shows the result. For companies with less than 5 patents evaluated, theessentiality ratio of 53.8%, the average of ratios for all the other companies, is applied to
avoid the estimation based on unreliable values.
Top three companies are Qualcomm, Huawei, and ZTE, which all have a large number ofdeclared patents. When compared with the previous survey, ZTE moves up in the ranking
from 6th position to 3rd , leveraging its large number of patents, and LG moves up from 9th
position to 5th, leveraging its higher essentiality ratio.
PantechHTC
24 (0.8%) 22 (0.7%)

Siemens
19 (0.6%)RIM
16 (0.5%)

NortelIntel
9 (0.3%) 8 (0.3%)
Sony
8 (0.3%)

Alcatel‐Lucent
24 (0.8%)
Apple
25
InnovativeSonic (0.8%)

TI
90 (3.0%)

Marvell
6 (0.2%)
IPR Licensing
5 (0.2%)35, (1.2%) ETRI
35 (1.2%)
Panasonic
53 (1.7%)
Nokia Siemens
63 (2.1%)
NEC64 (2.1%)
Sharp
86 (2.8%)

GeneralDynamics
8 (0.3%)

Qualcomm
318 (10.5%)
Huawei273 (9.0%)
Motorola
111 (3.7%)
CATT
141 (4.7%)
Ericsson177 (5.8%)
InterDigital
206 (6.8%)

ZTE
253 (8.3%)
Nokia Corp
245 (8.1%)

Samsung
233 (7.7%) LG
237 (7.8%)
NTT DOCOMO
211 (7.0%)

Figure 13 – Estimated number of essential patents

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Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

25

3. Estimation of the gross numbers of essential patents
Based on the results shown above, the main features of the major companies are
summarized as follows.
(i) Qualcomm
Qualcomm has the largest number of declared patents. It has continuously madedeclarations from as early as 2007 up to 2012. The company’s essentiality ratio stays
around the average level. As a result, Qualcomm secures the 1st place in the essential
patent ranking. This suggests that Qualcomm has been allocating significant resources foranalyzing its own patents and actively declaring patents that exceeds reasonable criteria. It
is foreseen that their declarations will further increase in the future. Keeping pace with thecompany’s globalization efforts, Qualcomm is likely to hold a lot of essential patents inmany countries.
(ii) Huawei
Huawei holds a large number of declared patents by declaring many patents in 2011 andwith continued declarations in 2012. Its registration-based essentiality ratio is close to theaverage. Huawei assumes the 2nd place in the estimated number of essential patents.
Observing that its registration-based essentiality ratio does not decline from thedeclaration-based one, the company is likely to hold high quality patents for the future.
(ⅲ ) ZTE
ZTE declared its patents, filed after 2006, in 2010, in a lump. The company has been
declaring patents in 2011 and 2012, and is likely to continue its declarations. ZTE’s
characteristic point is that the company amends its patent claims in accordance to thestandard specifications thus leading to successful registrations. As the result, its
registration-based essentiality ratio is high. Therefore, the company assumes higher
ranking (3rd place) in the estimated number of essential patents than its 7th place in thenumber of declarations. ZTE is one of the significant companies with strong IPR power.
(iv) Nokia
Nokia has continued its patent declarations from 2006 till 2011. Application dates rages
from around 1990 to the present time. This shows that the company analyzes its patentportfolio and declares those patents that meet its standards. Its patent registration ratio isrelatively high and essentiality ratio is at the average level. Globalizing its activities, thecompany is likely to hold a number of essential patents in many countries.
(v) LGLG declared its patents, filed between 1998 and 2011, in 2009, 2011, and 2012. It has
actively been declaring patents including relatively recently filed ones. Its highregistration-based essentiality ratio suggests that they have made declarations based onrelatively strict internal evaluations on their patents. LG is one of the companies withstrong IPR power.

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3. Estimation of the gross numbers of essential patents(vi) Samsung
Samsung started making its declarations after 2008 for patents filed mainly after 2005.
The company declared many patents in 2011 that resulted in a very large number ofdeclarations. It continued its declarations into 2012. Because its patents are new, its
registration ratio is still low and its essentiality ratio is lower than the average. In spite ofthis fact, because the number of declared patents is large, the estimated number of
essential patents is relatively large (6th place). Their policy of actively making declarations
is evident but there is a chance that the sheer number of essential patents may not increasesignificantly, depending on the results of future patent examinations.
(vii) NTT DOCOMONTT DOCOMO made declarations in 2009 and 2010 for its patent applications filed after
2005. The company has continued its activity into 2011 and 2012. The ratio of registeredpatents is high despite their being newer applications, and its essentiality ratio is veryhigh. As a result, NTT DOCOMO possesses a relatively high number of estimated essential
patents (7th place) when compared with the ranking in the declaration number (11th place).
It means that NTT DOCOMO is one of the companies with strong IPR power.
(viii) InterDigital
InterDigital shows a characteristic similar to Qualcomm. However, both registration
ratio and essentiality ratio are lower than Qualcomm and there are cases that declaredpatents were rejected in examinations. Hence, the number of essential patent may notincrease as can be seen with Qualcomm. Among the major companies, InterDigital is the
only one company that did not made any declaration in 2012 despite the company had
continuously made declarations until 2011. There is the possibility that its patentdeclarations are saturating.
(ix) Ericsson
Ericsson has continuously made declarations from 2009 till 2012. The registration ratio
and essentiality ratio are both at the average level. Application years rage from around1990 to the present time, but it is on a downward trend after its peak in 2007. There isunlikely that the number of declarations increases significantly in the future.
(x) CATTCATT declared its patents, filed between 2006 and 2010, in 2011 in a lump, and none in2012. Most patents were originally filed by Da Tang Mobile or SHANGHAI ULTIMATEPOWER. Its declaration-based essentiality ratio is very high (over 80%), but those patents
are mostly non-registered patents filed after LTE standardization. We should observe theeffect of future examinations of those patents.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
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27

3. Estimation of the gross numbers of essential patents(xi) Motorola
Motorola declared its patents, filed between 1990 and 2007, in 2010 in a lump and nonein 2011. It is estimated that Motorola has spent considerable time to make a comprehensive
analysis of its patents and selected those patents to be declared. It resumed its declarationsin 2012, but the number of applications has been declining from its peak in 2009. Its
number of declarations would not increase significantly for the future.
(xii) Apple
Apple has declared nearly 70 patents (1.1% of the total), filed between 1996 and 2009.
Most of them are the patents that were obtained from Nortel. Some of them were originallydeclared by Nortel. Including the ones that were re-declared, Apple is deemed to have madeits first declarations in 2012. Its declaration-based essentiality ratio is at the lowest level(31.8%). Apple’s IPR power does not seem strong, at least at present.
(xiii) General Dynamics
General Dynamics made declarations for the first time in 2012. All patents had beenobtained from IP Wireless. The number of patents is small, but its essentiality ratio isrelatively high (70%). Comparing to Apple, it seems that General Dynamics has been
declaring patents after sufficient internal examination. It seems that the company has
considerable IPR power.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

28

4. Summary

４ Summary
The main results of this survey are as follows:i)

The original list of patents declared to ETSI was obtained from the ETSI website. Bysorting them based on patent families, a total of 5,919 patents have been identified
as the subjects for this study. This is the effective number of declared patents. The
number of companies that have made declarations is 49.

ii)

The number of declared patens for each company are as follows:
Qualcomm has the largest number of declared patents (655, 11.1%) and is followed by
Samsung (652, 11.0％ ), Huawei (603, 10.2%), Nokia (505, 8.5%), InterDigital (418,
7.1％ ), Ericsson (399, 6.7%), ZTE (368, 6.2％ ), and LG(317, 5.4%). 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 have been filed after 2005, when LTE standardization
work began. In particular, the applications filed between 2006 and 2010 are dominant,and the declarations of the applications filed between 1999 and 2004 are alsosignificant. Some companies have made declarations for the patents filed in 2011.
(especially Huawei and InterDigital)iv)

Three types of companies have been identified, namely, a) those who have declaredpatents 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
standardization began), and c) those who have declared patents filed earlier years,
but not after 2005.

v)

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

vi)

Sample patents have been extracted from the list for evaluation. Average essentiality
ratios are identified to be 56.0% for declaration-based evaluation and 51.5% forregistration-based evaluation. With regard to registration-based essentiality
evaluation, LG, NTT DOCOMO, TI, and InnovativeSonic shows high essentiality
ratios while possessing a large number of registered patents.

Evaluation of LTE essential patents declared to ETSI
Copyright(c) 2013 Cyber Creative Institute All rights reserved.

29

4. Summaryvii)

Legal statuses of evaluated patents in respective application countries have beenstudied. The results show that Siemens, Sony, IPR Licensing, and General Dynamics
show the highest registration ratio of 100%, and Apple and Nortel also show highratios of over 95%. In contrast, CATT and ZTE show low ratios of around 10% and15%, respectively, reflecting the fact that patent examinations have not progressed
well.

viii)

The gross numbers of essential patents have been estimated by multiplying thederived essentiality ratios by the entire number of declared patents. Qualcomm is
estimated to have the largest number of essential patents (318), followed by Huawei(273), ZTE (253), Nokia (245), LG (237), Samsung (233), NTT DOCOMO (211),
InterDigital (206), Ericsson (177), CATT (141), and Motorola (111).

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30

References
References

1)

List of essential, or potentially essential IPRs notified to ETSI
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_sr/000300_000399/000314/

2)

3GPP standards
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/41101.htm
Release8: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-8
Release9: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-9
Release10: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-10
Release11: http://www.3gpp.org/Release-11

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31