Members of the Sisvel team share their key milestones from 2025 and their predictions on what the future will bring for the patent market

With 2026 already off to a roaring start, we asked key voices within Sisvel to share their top themes from last year and to look ahead at what will shape the SEP landscape in the 12 months to come.

The FRAND space in 2025 brought both new complexities and opportunities for collaboration. This backdrop, respondents agreed, has created significant opportunity for constructive engagement, amicable dealmaking and pool-facilitated licensing solutions.

Donald Chan, Head of FRAND and 5G MM Programme Manager

At this time last year, I expected the Chinese courts to play a more active role in FRAND adjudication in 2025. That didn’t happen. This could be chalked up to several factors, including lengthy legal procedures in China and the fact that not all litigation in the country becomes public.

But I think there is a more fundamental reason: growing acceptance among Chinese industry players of the need to pay SEP royalties. Some of the biggest licensing developments of the year in China were deals, rather than disputes. BYD agreed to an Avanci licence. Sunmi took a licence from Nokia for POS devices, despite having filed a rate determination case in the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court. Major Chinese streaming companies joined an Access Advance pool as licensor/licensees.

The drive behind this increased acceptance could be companies’ growing interest in licensing out their own portfolios. Several events from 2025 illustrate this trend, including ZTE’s campaign against Samsung and Oppo’s licensing activity across several verticals.

If these developments continue, we could continue to see a more balanced ecosystem in 2026: one marked by more cross-licensing deals, less litigation and a preference for mediation or arbitration when disputes do arise.

David Muus, Head of Licensing Programmes

Our programmes delivered many wins in 2025: new companies joined, new verticals opened, existing deals renewed, disputes were resolved and prevented, and royalties flowed back to inventors. That doesn’t happen by chance – it’s the result of hard work, persistence and collaboration. Some highlights worth celebrating:

• Wi-Fi 6 was on fire this year. We ran the number of licensees up to 38. We brought big names such as Netgear, Cisco and HP into the pool, showing that the industry is really aligning around our terms. And we didn’t stop there; we even made a move into the automotive supply chain with Panasonic Automotive Systems.

• We worked closely with Wilus to secure bilateral Wi-Fi 6 deals with Lenovo and LG Electronics – both done in a spirit of partnership.

• The AV1 pool hit a major milestone: licensing about half of AV1 finished products on the market. And we did it while clearing up confusion and bringing transparency to the patent landscape.

• Our DVB-T2 programme achieved something rare: every major implementer signed up under one pool licence, which represents every patent owner in the technology. That’s years of effort paying off – listening, engaging and executing.

• Cellular IoT kept building momentum, with our first batch of licensees and two new agreements with module makers in addition to our deal with Nordic Semiconductor. Our innovative model is gaining real traction. We also welcomed NEC Corporation, Panasonic and Kyocera to our already impressive group of patent owners. We now count 37 patent owners, representing close to 60% of the cellular SEP stack that we license in the patent pool.

These wins aren’t just numbers – they’re proof of the trust we’ve built and the value we deliver. So, thank you. Thank you for the energy, the ideas and the commitment you’ve shown all year. This gratitude is for our partners, licensees and colleagues, who are all fundamental building blocks of this success.

2026 will bring new challenges, but if last year is any indication, we’re ready to tackle them head-on. Looking into my crystal ball, I see some fireworks coming right after New Year’s Eve. Get ready: 2026 will be full of exciting opportunities!

Jukka Nihtila, Head of Business Development

In my view, the top theme of 2025 was the take-off of Wi-Fi licensing. The licensing activity that has occurred shows that the market is stabilising at Wi-Fi 6 royalty rate levels that make sense for both innovators and technology implementers. Given the rapid adoption of Wi-Fi 7 in key verticals (access points, smartphones, laptops), one could expect Wi-Fi 7 licensing to start in 2026. The past 12 months also saw a highly active and competitive patent transaction market for standardised technologies including 5G and Wi-Fi.

For the year ahead, I’ll be monitoring with interest developments in technologies that could play a greater role in global licensing further down the line. One can expect Wi-Fi 8 patent portfolio development to peak in 2026, with many key innovations of the standard being defined – we are already seeing Wi-Fi 8 announcements at this year’s CES. In the cellular world, 3GPP protocols will go into orbit as non-terrestrial network connectivity is rolled out in smartphones and IoT devices. The initial use case for this technology will be low-bandwidth emergency messaging and IoT connectivity.

Matteo Sabattini, Executive Adviser, Government Affairs

Growing tensions between the UK and German courts were one of 2025’s most dramatic themes. It would be entertaining if so much were not at stake. I find the back and forth of anti-, anti-anti- and even anti-anti-anti- orders so unnecessary. My view has always been that courts and judges should enforce the law. Absent a request by both parties, why would rate determination (or interim licences) be necessary? Should a court simply determine whether the offered rate is FRAND or not? Whether that represents a breach of the FRAND contract (in those jurisdictions that take a contract law approach) or whether it could be non-FRAND and therefore represent a possible abuse of dominance (for those jurisdictions that take an antitrust approach)? Huawei v ZTE would then instruct remedies.

As this jurisdictional tug-of-war continues in the background, I believe 2026 will be the year of pools. Everybody is talking about them, from the European Commission to the World Bank to the media. Very few know how to run them effectively and successfully – but Sisvel does. While regulation inevitably lags years behind a vibrant space such as high tech, industry and markets quickly coalesce to identify solutions – and these will increasingly take the form of pro-competitive, transparent patent pools. In the year ahead, I suspect we will see forms of aggregation being explored in multiple fields beyond FRAND-assured SEPs. In addition to pools, I believe the industry will also coalesce around global solutions that sidestep the complex jurisdictional fights that we have seen this year. That means ADR mechanisms will gain popularity.

Joff Wild, Chief Communication Officer

In 2025, patent pools received seals of approval from the European Union, the US and China.

The European Commission once again recognised their importance in the draft revised Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation and Technology Transfer Guidelines, which endorsed best-in-class practices and procedures already followed by Sisvel and several other pool administrators.

Meanwhile, speaking at a WIPO-organised event in Geneva in September, Acting Principal Counsel and Director for Patent Policy at the USPTO Chris Hannon talked about the importance of encouraging “the establishment and use of patent pools in the SEP arena”, continuing: “Well-managed pools increase transparency around royalty rates, questions of essentiality and patent scope.”

For its part, China’s National IP Administration joined forces with several other government agencies in the spring to publish Guidelines for the Construction and Operation of Patent Pools, signalling that pools are seen as a crucial lever in the dissemination of cutting-edge technologies.

These were significant and welcome endorsements that I hope can be built on in the year to come. At a time when technology markets are becoming increasingly complex and a growing number of players are seeking to enter them, well-run, transparent pools provide simple, one-stop access to the patents that underpin world-class inventions. The best ones are also flexible, able to adapt to new conditions and focused on finding a royalty pricing balance that works for licensor and licensee alike. They have also been subject to decades of legal and regulatory scrutiny. That means they are ready right now to deliver cost-efficient certainty and freedom to operate.

Instead of prioritising new, untested concepts such as licensing negotiation groups, my hope is that in 2026, policymakers will instead focus their attention on incentivising more engagement with patent pools from all parts of the market. This would deliver positive results far more quickly than any of the alternatives.

Yixiong Zou, Managing Director, China

2025 marked the beginning of an exciting new phase for Sisvel in China. Since I joined the company in September and we announced plans to establish a permanent business presence here in Shenzhen, we have been hard at work connecting with partners, engaging with the market and getting our office and team ready.

There were quite a few developments within the broader SEP landscape in China, including the publication of the Guidelines for the Construction and Operation of Patent Pools in April, jointly released by the CNIPA, Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), SAMR and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The guidelines signal that the country’s top IP and tech regulators are fully aligned on the high-level principles for what aggregated licensing should look like. The message is clear: patent pools are critical to and well aligned with China’s push for “New Quality Productive Forces”.

Looking at the year ahead, I believe that this guidance on patent pools has created an opportunity for industry to take the lead in developing licensing programmes that are market oriented, balanced, open and non-discriminatory. Chinese companies will play an ever-larger role in initiating and championing these efforts as the country continues to transition towards being a net IP exporter. And given the wide range of technologies in which Chinese firms are at or near the cutting edge, I think we’ll start to see patent pool development in non-traditional areas beyond wireless connectivity and multimedia.

Editor's note: Stay tuned for further in-depth previews on the SEP legal environments in Europe and the United States