Huawei starts charging licensing fees on tech giant

For the first time, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer has begun charging US tech giant Apple Inc a licensing fee.

Huawei Technologies said it signed confidentiality agreements with Apple and would not be disclosing the specific figure.

A report from Guangdong provincial intellectual property office that monitors patents shows that Huawei licensed nearly 770 patents covering GSM, UMTS and LTE wireless communications technologies to Apple last year, while Apple licensed 98 patents to Huawei.

The Chinese company credited its heavy spending on product research and innovation for its patents. By the end of last year, Huawei filed 52,550 patent applications in China and over 30,000 patent applications in foreign countries.

In 2015, it ranked first in the world with the most international patent applications filed through the Patent Cooperation Treaty and ranked fourth in Europe with nearly 2,000 patent applications.

A customer tries a Huawei smartphone at a shop in Yichang, Hubei province. Liu Junfeng / For China Daily