Who Is Leading the 5G Patent Race?

The adoption of 5G technology extends beyond smartphones and tablets to a growing array of connected devices, including smartwatches, industrial Internet of Things endpoints, automotive modules, smart home appliances, and medical devices. This broad deployment has made 5G not only a consumer phenomenon but also the foundation of next-generation connectivity across various industries, including transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and energy. As the significance of 5G has increased, so too has licensing activity surrounding standard-essential patents (SEPs).

In recent years, litigation over 5G SEPs has intensified in key jurisdictions, with courts increasingly setting concrete FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms. The 5G licensing market is now more dynamic and legally complex than ever, requiring both licensors and implementers to develop consistent strategies grounded in objective criteria for determining FRAND rates. Access to reliable data on patent ownership and coverage has become a crucial starting point for these negotiations, offering a common foundation for licensing discussions. This 5G report examines these developments through a data-driven lens, highlighting how patent ownership, portfolio strength, and standards contributions shape today’s licensing landscape.

Looking ahead, 5G SEP licensing will continue to be a multifaceted and strategically critical domain for both licensors and implementers.

• United States: SEP litigation remains intense, with increasing participation by PAEs in SEP disputes. According to a recent report on US SEP Litigation Trends, the Eastern District of Texas continues to dominate, followed by Delaware and the Western District of Texas, while the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) shows the fastest growth in SEP cases. Although many cases settle or are dismissed, plaintiffs are increasingly selecting venues perceived as favorable.
• Europe (Germany and Unified Patent Court): SEP holders are adopting dual-track strategies that combine national court actions with filings before UPC local divisions. The UPC is emerging as a key forum for SEP disputes, closely examining negotiation behavior and actively asserting jurisdiction through measures such as anti-anti-suit injunctions.
• China: Recent disputes, including the Nokia–OPPO case in Chongqing, demonstrate that Chinese courts are becoming influential in global FRAND rate-setting. These developments offer licensors enforcement opportunities in a major market and provide implementers with negotiation benchmarks. However, concerns remain that lower rates may impact global licensing positions.
• United Kingdom: UK courts continue to reinforce their role in global FRAND determinations. They assert jurisdiction over worldwide licensing terms. Courts have also granted interim cross-licenses to protect implementers while litigation proceeds. For licensors, these developments underscore the importance of transparent and principled negotiations.
• India, Brazil, and Colombia: In India, the focus has been on FRAND compliance, while in Brazil, preliminary injunctions have sometimes halted device sales until royalties are settled. In Colombia, both the competition authority and civil courts have intervened to address alleged unwillingness to license SEPs, though outcomes remain varied.

The race for 5G dominance is clearly reflected in public patent declarations and standards contribution submissions, which form the basis of this report. To evaluate leadership in 5G innovation, the analysis focuses on granted 5G patent family declarations submitted to ETSI as of October 31, 2025. The data for this report was retrieved on December 1st, 2025, and includes only declarations publicly available on ETSI’s website at that time. Declarations added after December 1st, 2025, even if retroactively dated to October or earlier, are not included. This one-month window accounts for ETSI’s processing time for submitted declarations.

For more details on our data retrieval and processing methodology, please visit: www.lexisnexisip.com/our-methodology-5g-report

Identification of 5G patent declarations was conducted using the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) technical specification (TS) database, mapping ETSI-declared TS to the 5G technology generation. The analysis also accounted for 5G bridging technologies, spanning from 3G to 5G and from 4G to 5G. Patents were counted based on INPADOC family definitions and the LexisNexis Ultimate Ownership concept, which attributes each patent to the most recent assignee and the highest-level parent company as of December 1st, 2025.

5G technology continues to evolve with 5G Advanced, starting from Release 18, which builds on the core 5G standard while adding new capabilities, improved performance, and expanded use cases such as industrial IoT and AI-driven optimization. This ongoing evolution drives continued R&D, with companies filing patents relevant to both 5G and 5G Advanced. Patent and standards contribution data reflect this sustained innovation, showing a steady flow of new filings. By October 31, 2025, over 66,000 active 5G patent families had been granted globally, up from 53,000 in 2024, highlighting the rapid pace of innovation and competition in the 5G ecosystem (figure 1).

For this report, the 3GPP contribution analysis concentrates on technical submissions, effectively filtering out editorial changes or agenda items. In our study, only technical contributions are counted, ensuring that the dataset accurately reflects substantive and potentially patentable contributions. Over recent years, the volume of technical contributions related to 5G has remained consistently high, culminating in a record of over 90,000 contributions in 2024.

Both the number of 5G patent declarations and participation in developing the 5G standard have continued to grow significantly year over year. A company’s credibility in the 5G ecosystem heavily relies on its active involvement in developing high-quality standard specifications. Participation in the 3GPP, the organization responsible for 3G, 4G, and 5G standards, allows companies to incorporate their patented innovations into the standards. Consequently, 5G contribution data serves as a critical indicator of a company’s commitment to and investment in advancing 5G technology.

SEP licence deals can reach tens or hundreds of millions of euros in major licensor–implementer agreements, in rare cases, such as Apple/Qualcomm, even billions. With the cellular licensing market estimated at $15-$20B per year, even small percentage deviations in portfolio size directly translate into very large valuation swings. Because royalties are typically benchmarked against the strength and coverage of a licensor’s SEP portfolio, a few percentage points difference in the underlying dataset can mean many millions of dollars in annual licensing revenues. 

Although essentiality and patent value are not determined, ETSI data is frequently used as a starting point, with essentiality testing and patent strength estimations performed subsequently. 

If the foundational input is already off, every subsequent patent merit analysis could be distorted. This is why reliable data matters more in SEP licensing than in almost any other patent context. LexisNexis^®IPlytics™ provides a declaration database with 99.9% verified precision, validated by 35 ETSI 5G-declaring companies. Using verified declaration data ensures that negotiations begin from an objective baseline and proceed with confidence and transparency. 

By contrast, raw ETSI data show an aggregate error rate of ~18% across major owners, driven by ~15% declared patent number-matching and normalization misses, as well as ~4% effects on patent ownership declaration. On a conservative $15.1B total cellular royalty market, each percentage-point shift in share corresponds to roughly €151M. A licensor with a 5–10% portfolio share, therefore, risks a $136M-$272M per-year valuation drift if relying on raw ETSI rather than verified data. 

The importance of using accurate, normalized data is highlighted in the figures, illustrating the scale of missing granted patent family counterparts in raw ETSI records across key jurisdictions. These discrepancies underscore how unverified data can materially misrepresent portfolio size and magnify financial impact on royalty estimates. 

The difference in action 

Consider ‘Licensor A’ using a provider that relies on raw ETSI data without a cleaning or verification process. Their portfolio appears to hold a 0.5% market share, worth roughly $75.5M in royalties. When the same portfolio is assessed using IPlytics’ verified declaration data – which, across the database, delivers an average ~18% accuracy uplift driven by corrected patent matches, ownership normalization, and direct validation with declaring companies – Licensor A’s implied share increases to approximately 0.59%, raising the estimated royalty value to $89.1M. That ~$13M difference stems entirely from starting with reliable, verified data.

For implementers, inaccuracies in raw ETSI data can translate directly into inflated royalty demands. Assume that ‘Licensor A’ and ‘Licensor B’ each have a portfolio covering the same number of 5G patent families. Suppose Implementor X signed a license with Licensor A, whose 5G patent declarations are, however, poorly captured in ETSI. When Licensor B seeks royalty payments, the raw ETSI data overstates Licensor B’s position compared to Licensor A, showing an apparent 0.8% advantage over Licensor A, worth roughly $121M in global royalty value. If Implementor X represents 5% of the total market, this gap drives roughly an extra $6M per year in payments, or around $12M per year if their share is 10%. Over a typical five-year license term, this amounts to $30M-$60M in costs. Using a consistent, verified data source eliminates this distortion and removes Licensor B’s ability to justify a premium based on misreported portfolio size. 

Understanding who leads in 5G matters because today’s innovators shape not only the global licensing environment but also the technical direction that will influence the transition to 6G. Leadership is not defined by patent volume alone. It emerges from a combination of portfolio size, portfolio strength, and sustained participation in standards development over multiple technology generations.

This report evaluates 5G leadership across three dimensions. The first is the count of granted and active 5G declared patent families, offering an indicator of scale. The second is the Patent Asset Index, which assesses the relative value and influence of a company’s portfolio by measuring impact based on citation patterns and geographic breadth. The third measures 3GPP technical contributions, demonstrating how actively a company shapes the technical content of the standard.

These indicators often reveal different forms of leadership. For example, Huawei appears at the top of both the family count and contribution metrics, reflecting extensive portfolio breadth and consistent engagement in standards development. Qualcomm, which ranks high in family count, rises even further when assessed by the Patent Asset Index, indicating a portfolio with comparatively strong technical influence. Meanwhile, research-focused organizations such as InterDigital, Fraunhofer, or Ofinno significantly improve their value-based ranking, despite having smaller portfolios, because the Patent Asset Index highlights the high technical relevance of their innovations.

Together, these perspectives illustrate that 5G leadership cannot be reduced to a single number. Instead, it emerges from how effectively companies combine portfolio size, portfolio quality, and standards participation to drive the evolution of the 5G ecosystem.

Table 1: Extract from the top 50 5G patent owners, by 5G patent families, Patent Asset Index and 5G standards contributions.

Rank	Ultimate Owner	HQ	Rank based on number of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families	Rank based on Patent Asset Index of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families	Rank based on 3GPP contributions identified as technical
1	Huawei	CN	1	2	1
2	Qualcomm	US	2	1	4
3	Samsung	KR	4	3	5
4	Ericsson	SE	5	5	2
5	LG Electronics	KR	3	4	10
See the Full List of Top 50 Ultimate Owners

The value of a 5G patent portfolio depends not only on its size but also on the specific technologies it protects. Release-based and working group analyses offer a deeper understanding of where companies exert technical influence and how their portfolios align with foundational versus advanced features of the standard.

A release-based perspective highlights how companies contribute to different stages of the 5G evolution. Release 15, which introduced the 5G New Radio framework, remains the most foundational. Companies such as Samsung and Ericsson rank higher when focusing strictly on Release 15 families, reflecting strong positions in core 5G technologies. By contrast, companies like LG Electronics see their position strengthen in later releases such as Release 16 and Release 18, where expanded use cases and advanced features become more prominent.

Table 2: Extract from the top 50 5G patent owners by 5G patent family count relevant across 3GPP Release 15, 16, 17, and 18. 

Rank	Ultimate Owner	HQ	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families Release 15	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families Release 16	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families Release 17	Number of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families Release 18
1	Huawei	CN	1	4	1	6
2	Qualcomm	US	2	2	5	9
3	Samsung	KR	3	5	10	3
4	Ericsson	SE	4	12	4	11
5	ZTE	CN	5	6	7	7

Working group analysis offers another layer of insight. RAN 1 and RAN 2 cover physical layer and radio protocol technologies that all 5G devices rely on. Companies, including LG Electronics and Samsung, appear stronger in these groups relative to others, indicating deeper involvement in the technical underpinnings of the standard. In contrast, companies with portfolios concentrated in RAN 3, RAN 4, or SA 2 may demonstrate influence over higher-level coordination, performance, or network architecture, even if their presence in foundational groups is more limited.

Table 3: Extract from the top 50 5G patent owners ranked by 5G patent family count relevant across 3GPP Group RAN 1-4 and SA 2. 

Rank	Ultimate Owner	HQ	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families RAN 1	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families RAN 2	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families RAN 3	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families RAN 4	Rank of active and granted 5G declared Patent Families SA 2
1	Huawei	CN	1	1	1	1	1
2	LG Electronics	KR	3	2	13	9	9
3	Samsung	KR	4	3	2	6	11
4	Qualcomm	US	2	6	7	7	5
5	ZTE	CN	5	4	5	2	14

Examining these patterns helps identify which companies shaped the earliest stages of 5G development, who is driving enhancements in 5G Advanced, and how strategic strengths differ across the technical layers of the standard. Download the full report to see which companies own the strongest portfolio in the various releases and working groups of 5G technology.

Get access to the 5G report with a full ranking of patent owners to benchmark your position.

Using data can significantly strengthen patent licensing and FRAND determinations in courts by providing objectivity, actionable insights, and strategic clarity during negotiations. Comprehensive databases that include declared patents, ultimate patent ownership, and company-specific standards contributions enable licensing teams to understand who owns what portion of the total stack of patents for a certain standard technology. Aggregated data on declared patent families and contributions to standards provides a reliable benchmark for assessing the size, scope, and value of individual portfolios, supporting more informed and defensible licensing decisions.

However, data comes with limitations:

• Declared 5G patents in the ETSI database are self-declared and are not independently validated for essentiality.
• Even when a patent is considered essential, its technical and economic value can vary significantly.
• Some patents protect core, mandatory elements of the 5G standard and reflect substantial innovation, while others relate to marginal improvements or optional features that are not implemented across all devices or networks.

Despite these limitations, data on patent declarations and standards contributions are publicly available and objective. It therefore often serves as a critical starting point for parties entering 5G patent licensing negotiations, providing a common reference that informs the size and value of patent portfolios and helps structure discussions.

The ETSI declaration database is the largest of its kind, currently containing over 500,000 declared 5G patents, spanning more than 100,000 patent families. In response to court rulings restricting the enforcement of late-declared patents, many companies today self-declare 5G patents at the earliest stage.

However, the self-declaration process introduces significant variability, as companies use different patent number formats and types, ranging from provisional numbers to granted patents and jurisdictional counterparts. This inconsistency renders the raw data of the ETSI database ambiguous, leading to biased top-down assessments of the patent owner’s share. Companies that disclose more extensive information can appear to hold larger portfolios, while those that share less are underrepresented.

Over the past decade, patent data providers have developed sophisticated methods to match, clean, and normalize patent numbers. Yet complexity has prevented some providers from producing fully accurate datasets, resulting in conflicting shares and numbers across 5G patent reports. Multiple reports with divergent rankings from the same public ETSI source have raised questions among SEP owners, implementers, lawyers, and economists about which data can be trusted.

The LexisNexis Cellular Verified initiative addressed this issue by comparing public ETSI data with internal records from 35 ETSI-declaring companies. This verification ensures the highest accuracy and reliability, producing a clean, unbiased database with precise patent counts.

The validation process includes rigorous data cleaning to harmonize patent records, extensive data enhancement to track worldwide legal status and ownership hierarchies, and direct validation with ETSI-declaring companies to ensure public records match internal submissions.

This approach ensures 5G patent counts and ownership shares are accurate, impartial, and reliable, offering the industry a trusted standard for assessing declared 5G portfolios.

Determining FRAND licensing rates for SEPs is inherently complex. There are two primary approaches widely used in practice: the top-down approach and the comparable license approach.

The top-down approach starts by estimating the total royalty burden for a given standard and then allocating a proportional share to each SEP holder based on their patent ownership. This method emphasizes fairness by ensuring that each patent holder receives a portion of the royalty consistent with their contribution and SEP ownership to the standard. By contrast, the comparable license approach benchmarks rates against existing SEP license agreements, adjusting for differences in portfolio size, quality, and patent scope. Courts and regulators often consider both approaches, though challenges remain due to limited transparency and inconsistent valuation practices across portfolios.

Regardless of the method employed, objective, data-driven analysis is critical. For top-down assessments, accurate data on the total 5G patent landscape and the individual patent owners’ shares are critical. For comparable license assessments, access to comprehensive and verified 5G patent portfolio data is necessary to avoid skewed comparisons, ensuring adjustments fairly reflect differences in portfolio size, quality, and technical relevance. Increasingly, courts have relied on data-supported analyses. Declared patent data has become a widely accepted starting point for FRAND determinations, allowing IP professionals to quantify both the numerator (patents owned by a 5G patent holder) and the denominator (total 5G patents for a standard), which is fundamental to assessing ownership share fairly.

Patents, and especially SEPs, are unique in their technical and legal characteristics. Evaluating a SEP portfolio requires more than simply counting patent families. Advanced analyses consider patent strength metrics, such as the Patent Asset Index, the company’s activity in standards development (e.g., ranking in 5G standards contributions), and further breakdowns by 3GPP release and working group. This level of granularity enables licensors, licensees, and courts to understand the actual impact of a company’s portfolio on the development of the standard.

Licensing rates also require geographic adjustments, as licensees often deploy products unevenly across regions. A SEP portfolio that is largely restricted to one jurisdiction, typically the owner’s home country, may not justify a global royalty, whereas an internationally filed portfolio may carry significantly higher value.

Additionally, the legal status of patents, such as pending expirations, and the ownership history, including past assignments or corporate reorganizations, are crucial for assessing both current licensing potential and calculating past damages.

Ultimately, accurate and fair FRAND rate-setting relies on complete, high-quality 5G patent data that covers portfolio size, value, jurisdictional coverage, legal status, and historical ownership. Solutions like IPlytics are critical for enabling transparent, data-driven 5G patent analyses, supporting informed negotiations, and providing a defensible foundation for FRAND licensing discussions.

The use of 5G SEPs is rapidly expanding beyond mobile devices into multiple industries, creating both opportunities and challenges for SEP owners and implementers. IP professionals must anticipate future business needs over the next two, five, and ten years and ensure their patent licensing strategies are aligned to support these objectives.

An objective, data-driven approach to evaluating 5G patent portfolios is essential. Reliable, well-curated data on patent declarations, pools, and standards contributions provides critical insights into patent ecosystems, helping to assess portfolio value for licensing, pool participation, or SEP transactions. Proactive management, staying ahead of industry trends, and preparing for emerging challenges, is key to maintaining a competitive edge.

Key considerations include:

• Patent value analysis: Incorporating metrics such as the Patent Asset Index provides deeper insights into patent quality and impact, complementing simple counts and offering a more nuanced view of 5G portfolio value.
• Active monetization: SEP holders are increasingly aggressive in monetizing and enforcing their portfolios in this high-stakes 5G environment.
• Complex SEP landscape: Navigating SEP licensing for 4G and 5G beyond smartphones involves operational and financial challenges for both owners and implementers.
• Reliable data: While ETSI maintains the largest cellular patent declaration database, data quality issues can underrepresent certain 5G portfolios. Validated, comprehensive databases are critical for accurate, data-driven licensing and portfolio management.
• Standards contributions correlation: Rankings based on contributions to standards often align with patent rankings, offering valuable competitive intelligence and reference points for licensing negotiations.