Major players in the European Standard Patent (SEP) field

By searching all patent applications filed at the EPO between 1993 and 2021, patent applications in the field of standard patents are classified into category H04 IPC, on this basis, a distinction is made between patent applications that have been declared to ETSI as essential to a standard (“ETSI”) and patent applications that have not been declared as essential to a standard (“non-ESTI”).

The top applicants for ETSI patents in category H04 are:

This result is in line with expectations, considering the market where Qualcomm, Nokia and Huawei lead.

Further retrieve the relative grant rate of each applicant (total number of ETSI grants/total number of ETSI applications):

While all applicants had significantly higher grant rates than the average (compared to other applications in H04), there were some notable differences between applicants, with LG having the highest grant rate, with 80% of its SEP applications ultimately granted, while companies such as ZTE and InterDigital had much lower grant rates of 47% and 51% respectively.

Combining this data with the applicants’ business context, the following chart shows the percentage of applicants’ H04 documents that were subsequently declared to ETSI as essential standards:

As for the oppositions and invalidation requests received for these authorized patents, the following conclusions can be drawn:

The data also shows that more and more companies have joined the SEP ranks, including Daimler AG, 3G Licensing sa and Sony Corporation.