In late August of this year, LG Electronics transferred 15 U.S. video standard-essential patents to Honor, and the transfer has been registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Honor has previously been relatively restrained in the area of standard-essential patents, with key milestones including a 5G cross-licensing agreement with Nokia in early 2024 and its joining the Via Licensing Alliance’s AAC patent pool in March 2026. According to public records, neither Honor nor Huawei had previously acquired LG patents.

This batch of patents consists entirely of video standard-essential patents, covering core video coding and decoding technologies. Among them is “Method and Apparatus for Inter-Frame Prediction in a Video Processing System” (registration number US11,102,478). This patent pertains to inter-frame prediction technology in video processing systems, including core processes such as deriving control points for the current block and estimating motion vector values based on adjacent blocks.

When LG Electronics exited the smartphone business in 2021, it held approximately 24,000 standard patents globally, covering communication technologies such as 4G, 5G, and Wi-Fi. In addition to Honor, OPPO acquired 55 patents between 2023 and 2024; TCL King and vivo purchased 14 and 47 patents, respectively, in 2024; and a mobile software company acquired 59 patents in 2025.

In addition to Chinese companies, LG Electronics has also transferred U.S. patents to several international companies in recent years: 83 patents were transferred to Taissa Research in April 2022; 298 U.S. video codec standard patents were transferred to Nokia in June 2025; and 16 U.S. standard patents were transferred to Toyota in January 2026.