Latest World Intellectual Property Organization report ranks ZTE among global top-3 innovators for fifth straight year

24 March 2015, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, announced today that global patent applications made by the company has exceeded 60,000, as innovation and research generate increasing value under the new M-ICT strategy.

More than 17,000 patents have been granted to ZTE, as the company consolidated its position as one of the world’s leading technology innovators. ZTE ranked third globally in patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in the past year, according to the latest annual report published by the World Intellectual Property Organization this month. This was the fifth successive year in which ZTE was ranked inside the Global Top-3 by WIPO.

“Technology innovation is central to ZTE’s business, as our patented research is key to empower the growth of the company’s operations globally,” said Guo Xiaoming, Chief Legal Officer at ZTE. “Under ZTE’s new M-ICT strategy, we will continue to harness our intellectual property assets to drive new innovations, delivering superior products and services to our customers around the world.”

ZTE will allocate increased resources on research of 5G technologies and patents in order to shape the future of next-generation networks. At the Mobile World Congress 2015 conference in Barcelona this month, ZTE showcased the company’s world-leading capabilities in 5G research, demonstrating the world’s first pre5G Massive MIMO commercial base station, achieving data throughput of 400Mbps using a single-carrier frequency and a 128-antenna design.

As one of the main contributors in the definition of 4G standards, ZTE is committed to promote the development of 5G technology and standards. Shi Lirong, President and Chief Executive Officer of ZTE, this month met Carlos Moedas, Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation in the European, paving the way for further collaboration in the area of 5G research. Commissioner Moedas also invited ZTE to participate in the Horizon 2020 program to drive technology development and digitization in the European Union. 

In 2014, ZTE unveiled its M-ICT strategy to accelerate innovations to empower customers to capture new opportunities and create value from the proliferation of mobile connectivity. As users and devices acquire greater capabilities to communicate, the M-ICT era will drive transformative innovations for individual consumers, businesses and entire industries. ZTE is focusing on innovations such as wireless charging for electric vehicles, distributed power generation, big data platforms and applications, Internet Finance, as well as the Internet of Vehicles, self-driving cars, robotics and low-altitude satellite technologies.

ZTE is building partnerships and industry ecosystems to strengthen the company’s technology portfolio and assets. ZTE is the maker of the Star 2 smartphone, featuring the world’s most-advanced voice-control technology, and is leading efforts to drive further technology development in this field through the Smart Voice Alliance, together with partners such as Baidu, Nuance, Audience and NXP.

More than 90% of the patents owned by ZTE resulted from original inventions, including a high number of standard-essential patents adopted in the telecommunications industry globally. ZTE is committed to leading-edge innovations in 4G and 5G telecommunications, intelligent mobile devices, optical communications, cloud-computing, big data and emerging technologies to play a leading role in the development of next-generation technologies.