ZTE Corp. announced that it is now one of the leading vendors in the world of essential patent (EP) for LTE standards, securing 235 of these patents.

ZTE also has a 7% share of the total LTE essential patents declared on the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) online database of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute as of 30th November 2010.

As of the end of 2010, ZTE had submitted more than 6800 proposals to 3GPP, of which more than 3900 proposals involved LTE/SAE technologies, and had made more than 2900 LTE-related patent applications.

Looking ahead, ZTE aims to increase its current share of LTE essential patents from 7% to 10% by 2012, according to Hu Jian, Vice President of ZTE. The company will also commit more R&D resources to accumulate essential patents and adopt a pro-active approach in improving 4G and incubating 4G+ standards.

“With LTE essential patents being evenly distributed among different vendors, we believe that it will be helpful to provide a comparatively healthy and balanced IPR licensing environment for the development of the 4G industry,” said Hu.