Huawei topped the patent application table last year according to WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

But Tokyo analysts Patent Result says that only 21% of the 5,405 patent applications made by Huawei last year could be regarded as highly innovative, reports the Nikkei.

Patent Result asseses patents by a number of criteria including originality, actual technological applications and versatility and then assesses how far their quality deviated from a baseline figure

Patents with a deviation of 55 or higher are considered to represent high quality or truly innovative inventions.

Only 21% of Huawei’s applications make the high quality rating compared to 44% of Qualcomm’s applications and 32% of Intel’s applications.

Patent Result lists Huawei’s 30 best engineers and finds that 17 of them are foreigners. The 17 are responsible for 370 high quality patents.

Huawei been buying patents – with around 500 patents bought from foreign companies, including 250 from US groups. The high quality patents account for some 67% of these.

Source: Electronicsweekly