The past 12 months brought big licensing wins, major internal investments and significant industry initiatives

We have come to the end of a very busy year for the Sisvel team around the world. Many of us will soon be enjoying a short break before hitting the ground running at the start of January. But first, let’s look back at some of the highlights that made 2025 a banner year for Sisvel and our partners.

Driving returns for patent owners

Sisvel’s business is licensing, and business was good in 2025. Each of our programmes recorded successes on the dealmaking front: new companies were licensed, new verticals entered, existing deals renewed and royalties returned to patent owners. The many highlights included the following:

• The Wi-Fi 6 programme racked up win after win, as new deals were inked with big-name players. Netgear, Cisco and HP Inc all became pool licensees, underlining the growing industry consensus around the pool terms. The programme also made inroads in the auto supply chain in a deal with Panasonic Automotive Systems.

• Sisvel supported Wilus in reaching bilateral Wi-Fi 6 licensing agreements with Lenovo and LG Electronics. Both were amicable deals.

• As of July, the AV1 pool had licensed around 50% of AV1 finished products on the market. It did this while bringing much-needed transparency to the patent landscape and correcting widespread misconceptions around AV1 royalty obligations.

• The DVB-T2 programme achieved a rare feat: it signed up every major implementer of DVB-T2 technology to a pool licence that covers all the declared SEPs in the space. This milestone was made possible by years of effort put into listening to the market, bringing together stakeholders and executing deals.

• Sisvel Cellular IoT entered into two additional agreements with module makers, showing that its groundbreaking model for efficient licensing at the end-product level is gaining acceptance. Nordic Semiconductor is among the companies that have completed deals under this framework.

Gearing up for the next phase of growth

Sisvel also saw important organisational growth during the year, adding new people and expanding key functions. This will enable us to scale up our operations while maintaining the qualities that set us apart in the market – responsiveness, adaptability and transparency.

• We introduced Sisvel Bespoke, a custom dealmaking service led by Nick Dudziak that helps to get complex patent transactions over the line to the benefit of all parties involved.

• Matteo Sabattini returned to Sisvel to lead a revamped government affairs function and ensure that policymakers in Europe, the US and Asia understand how Sisvel’s solutions assist consumers and power innovation.

• Yoshinori Shimizu was appointed managing director of our Tokyo office, kicking off a new era in our efforts to consolidate our relationships with our many Japanese partners.

• Injoon Song became Sisvel’s first senior hire in South Korea – another market where the business has cultivated deep partnerships over many years with both licensors and licensees.

• We announced plans to open a new Sisvel office in Shenzhen and named Yixiong Zou as our first-ever managing director for China.

• We unveiled a new firmwide ESG initiative led by Matteo Morroi with a focus on people and governance, ensuring that Sisvel maintains its strong corporate culture and values as the business expands.

Supporting industry-led solutions

In 2025, we continued to show that Sisvel can bring both sides of the market together, propose constructive solutions to licensing challenges and put them into practice.

• At Sisvel Connect 2025, held in Barcelona in October, representatives from all parts of the SEP market gathered to discuss issues of common concern and express their honest views. The event sparked a constructive conversation – one which needs to continue and which offers real possibility of progress.

• We co-hosted a high-level policy forum in Rome which provided actionable ideas for how Europe can harness intellectual property to boost its competitiveness in the global innovation economy.

• As a founding signatory of the WIPO Mediation Pledge for IoT SMEs, Sisvel committed to a mechanism that offers mediation as a means to resolve SEP-related licensing impasses.

• We announced the launch of a new fund to support SMEs seeking to obtain a Cellular IoT pool licence – with Sisvel paying the royalties on the first 2,000 units sold by eligible licensees.

Sisvel Insights: top 10 most read articles of 2025

We also continued to publish a broad range of news, opinions and analysis on our Sisvel Insights page throughout the year. Here are the 10 articles that drove the most traffic in 2025, presented in chronological order:

1. The patent indemnification trap

Sisvel’s David Muus and Sven Torringer explained the loopholes and limits that many indemnification clauses contain, providing vital information to IoT device makers. Read more

2. UK ruling against Ericsson gives holdout a free pass

The UK FRAND litigation between Ericsson and Lenovo illustrated the impossible situation that SEP owners face when implementers fail to play by the rules, Sisvel government affairs lead Matteo Sabattini argued. Read more

3. The 10 issues shaping 6G standardisation

Sisvel Tech cellular expert Miqdad Hyder Junejo reported from a key 3GPP meeting in South Korea where the ground was prepared for 6G standardisation work. Read more

4. “US playing secondary role in global SEP disputes,” says former USPTO head

We interviewed David Kappos about the Trump administration’s IP leadership picks, the US role in global FRAND policy and the importance of patent pools. Read more

5. UK FRAND ‘law’: the state of play

In an exclusive guest piece, Gowling WLG partner Alexandra Brodie summed up the takeaways from the Court of Appeal’s FRAND judgments in InterDigital v Lenovo and Optis v Apple. Read more

6. Tokyo District Court grants first SEP injunction in Japan

Yoshinori Shimizu, Sisvel’s managing director for Japan, unpacked an unprecedented ruling in a FRAND case between Pantech and Google. Read more

7. Why our legal team is central to Sisvel’s success

In a Q&A, senior in-house counsel Christine Walmsley explained the many roles fulfilled by Sisvel’s legal function and discussed legal issues that are becoming more prominent in negotiations. Read more

8. US district court lacks jurisdiction to set pool FRAND rate

Sisvel Insights was among the first to report that a Massachusetts judge had issued a groundbreaking ruling rejecting a request to set a global FRAND rate for a patent pool. Read more

9. German court’s FRAND guidance strengthens SEP holders

Hosea Haag, a partner at AMPERSAND in Munich, provided a guest analysis of FRAND guidance issued by the Seventh Chamber of the Munich Regional Court – a rare glimpse into a top German court’s economic and legal reasoning. Read more

10. Busting myths about SEP licence arbitration

Former Nokia and InterDigital licensing exec Eeva Hakoranta explained how arbitration can produce genuine win-wins in major bilateral deals. Read more