LTE Patents
Samsung Electronics has owned the highest number of patents related to long-term evolution (LTE) technologies over the two years.
The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) said in its report on patent trends in the telecom industry that Samsung Electronics has been on the top perch among 66 global telecom-related businesses for having 954 standard-essential patents (SEPs) in the LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies, which accounts for 12.7 percent of the total.
TIPO said a total of 35 experts including Taiwan's researchers from the National Applied Research Laboratories, patent lawyers and professors participated in writing the report.
They analyzed 7,516 U.S. patents related to LTE and LTE-A, which have been registered to global LTE standardization organization, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, or ETSI, over the last three years. SEP refers to major patents that need to be applied to globally standardized products.
Samsung Electronics launched its new LTE service, which provides faster upload and download speeds, through its latest flagship smartphone Galaxy S7 in March.
As in the previous year, Qualcomm remained in the second spot with 11.9 percent. LG Electronics, which used to share the second spot with Qualcomm last year, fell to fifth place with 8.3 percent this year. China's Huawei had 5.3 percent to rank seventh whereas Apple had as low as 1.8 percent.