Comment by rjzzleep

12 hours ago

I'm surprised that people don't know the patent landscape. The US may be leading 5G patents in total numbers, probably by multinational corps. But 8 out of 10 top university contributions come from China and Huawei is the largest single company contributor in 5G research. Qualcomm wouldn't make an agreement with Huawei if they didn't need to.

To the people that say "why can't Huawei make a 5G phone". Huawei was manufacturing their chips with 5G modems at TSMC until the US went after them trying to turn them into HTC or Alstom Energy, but it failed. It's one of the reasons why Taiwan now has zero leverage as the US has been hollowing them out since the last administration. But Huawei have been building their own domestically produced modems for a few years now.

I used to attend the communication network meetups with all the professors in Germany and mI think all of them agree that all that energy sanctioning China should have been spent on actual competition domestically in the West.

https://insights.greyb.com/5g-patent-landscape/

23 comments

rjzzleep

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T-RN-R  12 hours ago

Huawei gets a lot of research output from its many Canadian Research and Development centres

  • whimsicalism  8 hours ago

    HN is enamored with the reddit-style of thought that China can only ever steal from Western research.

    • horsawlarway  7 hours ago

      I think it's a more complicated discussion.

      My read is that the US has over-indexed heavily on "intellectual property" and that position is profitable, but an overall net drag on innovation and research.

      China is much less indexed on IP, and often outright ignores it. This allows them to be much more competitive in innovation over the long term, but at short term reputational damage.

      ---

      From the US side - if you're a company operating in a restrictive, patent encumbered space... it absolutely feels like an unfair field. Those other companies are able to ignore the restrictions you're hemmed in by (steal).

      From the China side - if you're a company operating outside of compliance with licensing and IP, you get a reputation for "just stealing" even when your research is novel and impactful.

      Of the two - I believe the US is "more incorrect". The current IP laws feel a lot less like encouraging innovation and a lot more like government enabled and funded rent-seeking.

      6 replies →

    • culi  7 hours ago

      It doesn't even make sense. Huawei has R&D centers all over the world. Their largest outside of China is actually in India. But they also have research centers in Japan, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, the UK, and many more. They help drive research all across the globe. They and the countries they invest in mutually benefit from this partnership

  • culi  7 hours ago

    how does them partnering with some Canadian R&D facilities contradict anything in GP's post? They also have a ton of R&D in Sweden, Russia, Brazil, Japan, etc. Their largest R&D center outside of China is actually India

    Huawei 20% of its annual revenue back into R&D

  • tonyhart7  12 hours ago

    what are you implying here ??? they steal it from Canada RnD ??

    • tadkar  12 hours ago

      Google "Huawei Nortel Networks". The fact is that Nortel has an enormous volume of R&D stolen from them and the allegation is that Chinese telecom providers were the main beneficiaries.

      Edited: To reply to a child post, this is about the allegations referred to in the parent, not a statement of what I think is true now

      5 replies →

    • maxglute  12 hours ago

      Charitable interpretation is Huawei actually had R&D + academic linkages in Canada (was expanding aggressively globally), but Canada still drop in bucket, Canada R&D headcount peaked ~1k vs ~100k in PRC. Post sanction, Canada basically siloed from doing crown jewel work anyway.

    • maxglute  1 hour ago

      Nortelstans: You took everything from me.

      Huawei: I don't even know who you are.

      Terminally stupid cannucks still butt and misattributing Nortel primary fell to HW stole muh secrets, not that Nortel grossly mismanaged (and outright fraud). Hint PRC stole lots of shit back then... but Nortel fucking exploded spectacularly. Why didn't CISCO explode because HW copied some homework... because unlike CISCO, Nortel was mismanaged to shit. NVM HW wasn't even state champion at the time, that was ZTE, they didn't juicy state level industrial espionage perks. Meanwhile allegations against HW vs Nortel was over optical routing, i.e. niche shit to HW overall portfolio. It's just Canadian cope.

      This not mentioning Nortel basically brought this on themselves by bamboo ceiling the shit out of Chinese employees in PRC (both international/PRC nationals). Nortel HQ/Ottawa -> North PRC/Guangzhou, i.e. from Canadians to Chinese Canadians basically all defected Nortel (and poached entire R&D teams), because North PRC wasn't giving them their dues... and not just to PRC SOEs, but western competitors like lucent/acatel etc. Defectors were bitching / organizing in my local Counter Strike server, their AFKs very disruptive, so in a sense I was just as much victim as Nortel.