The Wireless Charging Innovators Poised to Capture the $1B+ Royalty Market
In a new report, “Who is Leading the Qi Standard Patent Race” LexisNexis reveals the most promising innovators in the growing wireless charging market
NEW YORK, March 27, 2024 – Wireless charging, using Qi standard technology, is moving well beyond cell phones into industries as diverse as automotive, healthcare, and hospitality. With over 9,000 Qi-compliant products on the market and 1 billion sold in 2023, Qi has become a crucial technology for enabling wireless power transfer between devices without cables or connectors.
LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading global provider of information and analytics, today released a new report, “Who Leads the Qi Wireless Charging Patent Race?” that analyzes the patent landscape around the Qi wireless charging standard.
The widespread adoption of Qi makes it a lucrative market for owners of standard essential patents (SEPs), which any implementer of the Qi standard must license.
In January 2020, Via Licensing Alliance, a patent pool administrator, announced a license for patents essential to the Qi standard, providing a comprehensive access point for wireless charging and power transfer. Since then, Via LA has attracted many of the largest Qi SEP owners and has published a list of more than 470 Qi standard essential patent documents on its website. Under the patent pool license contract, these SEP owners commit to license all SEPs for an aggregated pool rate between $0.20 to $0.85 per Qi standard-compliant product (receivers and transmitters).
Since not all holders of Qi-relevant patents are patent pool members, the total royalty market is estimated to be roughly one billion dollars.
The report reveals that only around 26-36% of all Qi-related patents are publicly disclosed to be standard essential through the Via Licensing Alliance Qi standard patent pool.
Exploring the Qi-related patent landscape using LexisNexis® IPlytics™ and the LexisNexis® PatentSight+™ patent analytics platform, including machine learning-based LexisNexis® Classification, the LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions experts identified more than 3,500 worldwide active and granted patent families relevant to Qi as of January 2024. Applying the LexisNexis Ultimate Owner concept, which assigns every patent to its highest controlling legal entity, to this broader set, Samsung, Apple, Canon, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Philips, LG Innotek, and Qualcomm lead in terms of the number of patent families related to Qi wireless charging. The study also considered the quality of these patent portfolios leveraging the Patent Asset Index metric, also featured in PatentSight+™.
Top patent owners ranked by the quantity of Qi-related patent families
| Patent Owner | Region of HQ |
| Samsung | KR |
| Apple | US |
| Canon | JP |
| LG Electronics | KR |
| Panasonic | JP |
| Philips | NL |
| LG Innotek | KR |
| Qualcomm | US |
| Sony | JP |
| Chemtronics | KR |
As Qi adoption rapidly grows, patent holders are poised to accelerate their monetization efforts through licensing deals. Manufacturers implementing Qi must prepare for negotiations by benchmarking patent holders’ relative strength.
“With the release of Qi 2.0 November last year, we now anticipate the usage of wireless charging expanding significantly,” said Tim Pohlmann, CEO and founder of LexisNexis® IPlytics™. “With so much at stake, licensors and licensees must not forego a detailed understanding of the Qi patent landscape through analytics to negotiate royalties effectively.”
The full report provides further details on the Qi patent landscape, the top 30 leading owners ranked by quantity and strength of their Qi-related portfolio, future considerations, and insights into unlocking value in the Qi marketplace. It is available for download at: https://www.lexisnexisip.com/Qi-patents
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About LexisNexis® Legal & Professional
LexisNexis® Legal & Professional provides legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,800 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
About LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions
LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions bring clarity to innovation for businesses worldwide. We enable innovators to accomplish more by helping them make informed decisions, be more productive, comply with regulations, and ultimately achieve competitive advantage for their business. Our broad suite of workflow and analytics solutions (LexisNexis® PatentSight+™, LexisNexis Cipher™, LexisNexis® IPlytics™, LexisNexis PatentOptimizer®, LexisNexis PatentAdvisor®, and LexisNexis TotalPatent One®, LexisNexis® IP DataDirect), enables companies to be more efficient and effective at bringing meaningful innovations to our world. We are proud to directly support and serve these innovators in their endeavors to better humankind.
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