Japan’s largest mobile operator NTT Docomo granted a patent licence covering standard-essential patents for its wireless communication technologies to Chinese equipment and smartphone maker Huawei.

The operator has awarded patent licences to more than ten companies and plans to grant such licences to other companies in the future, it said in a statement.

Docomo has more than 5,300 standard-essential patents for W-CDMA, LTE and LTE-Advanced standards. It receives licensing fees for its patents via both patent pools and directly from individual companies. Under the patent pool system, interrelated standard-essential patents are licensed together by the patent holders.

In January Huawei extended a global patent-licensing agreement with Ericsson, which included cross-licensing covering patents relating to their wireless standard-essential patents (GSM, UMTS and LTE). As part of the renewed agreement, Huawei is making on-going royalty payments based upon actual sales to Ericsson from 2016 and onwards.