DreamersGN Chapter 230 Patent Empire
Chapter 230 Patent Empire
The World Intellectual Property Organization's annual report has silenced global technology media. The cover of the "Global Patent Application Rankings" features a bar chart. The chart has five bars; the first four represent IBM, Samsung, Canon, and Huawei. The fifth bar is longer than the previous four combined.
402 Technology, with 15,000 patent applications annually.
This isn't a cumulative total of 15,000 patents, but a single year's total. It's not limited to a single field, but covers eight major categories: quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, satellite communications, new energy, unmanned systems, commercial aerospace, and space photovoltaics. The patent grant rate is 92%, while the global average is only 54%.
The same week the report was released, Bloomberg published a cover story titled "Chinese Company Builds a Patent Wall." The report quoted a Silicon Valley intellectual property lawyer as saying, "I've done patent circumvention analyses for seven Fortune 500 companies, and I've never seen a company with this level of patent density. 402 patents aren't scattered points; they're a network. You bypass one, and seven more are waiting for you."
At an internal meeting, Zuo Cheng opened WIPO's detailed data. He broke down the composition of the 15,000 patents into a few lines on a whiteboard: 8,000 in quantum computing, 6,000 in brain-computer interfaces, 5,000 in artificial intelligence, 10,000 in satellite communications, and 12,000 in other cutting-edge technologies. Adding these to the 35,000 valid patents already accumulated, 402's total number of valid patents worldwide exceeded 50,000.
Chen Hao's gaze lingered on the section on quantum computing: "What does 8,000 terms mean?"
Zuo Cheng cited a figure: "IBM has accumulated 30 years of experience in quantum computing, with 2,100 valid patents. We achieved nearly four times that in two years. This wasn't achieved through sheer quantity, but through cross-disciplinary integration. The intersection of quantum computing and communication led to a completely new error correction protocol, which spawned over a thousand patents. The intersection of quantum computing and AI further resulted in an algorithm for automatically optimizing quantum gate sequences, yielding another thousand patents."
Hoffman, sitting in the corner, suddenly spoke up: "When I was at IBM, I applied for about forty patents a year, which was the highest record in the entire department." In the three months he'd been at 402, he'd already participated in the application of over two hundred patents. It wasn't that he'd become stronger; it was that 402's technical framework meant that every step he took created a new pitfall.
"It's not a pit," Zuo Cheng corrected. "It's footprints."
These footprints are becoming a real wall. Han Lu switched to another table on the projector. Patent licensing revenue table. The top line displayed a number: five billion US dollars.
Several gasps were heard simultaneously in the conference room.
Han Lu read it aloud line by line. Microsoft's quantum computing interface protocol: $300 million annually. Google's quantum cloud service license: $200 million annually. IBM's quantum error correction cross-licensing: $150 million annually. Neuralink's brain-computer interface safety standard certification fee: $80 million annually. Toyota's autonomous driving communication protocol license: $120 million. Samsung's quantum chip process cross-licensing: equivalent to $180 million.
She read the entire page. These thirty-two companies pay over five billion dollars annually in patent licensing fees to 402. And that's growing at a rate of thirty percent per year.
Liu Wei leaned back in his chair: "So while others make money by developing products, we don't even need to develop products. We can support the entire R&D system just by collecting patent fees."
"Patents themselves are not the goal," Zuo Cheng said. "Patents are a byproduct of R&D investment. But what we're building isn't a patent wall, it's an entrance. Any company wanting to enter fields like quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, or satellite communications must first pass through 402. It's not because we're blocking them from entering, but because we hold the key to that door."
He stood up, walked to the whiteboard, drew a line under the five billion dollars, and then wrote three words below the line. And that wasn't all.
Han Lu switched to the next image, a topology diagram of the global patent licensing network. Starting from the headquarters in Hangzhou, the diagram showed a dense network of licensing lines extending to every major technology hub in the world. Silicon Valley's lines were the thickest, but the colors were based on payment records: red for payments from others to us, and blue for payments from us to them. The entire diagram featured both red and blue lines.
But the next image only has one color.
This is a distribution map of standard essential patents. Han Lu said, "The three international standards published by ISO contain more than 8,000 essential patents. Six thousand of them belong to 402. Any product wanting to enter these three tracks must obtain 402 patent authorization. There's no circumventing it."
"So the five billion dollars is just licensing fees," Chen Hao said. "Standard essential patents can generate licensing fees, as well as certification fees, testing fees, and upgrade fees. With each iteration of the standard, all companies following it have to repurchase a license."
"Yes," Zuo Cheng said. "That's standard business logic. It's not a one-time fee, it's a sustainable cash flow."
That evening, CCTV's financial channel aired a special report, "The Birth of a Patent Empire." The host's opening remarks consisted of only one sentence: "Before today, I never imagined that a Chinese company could surpass IBM and Samsung in the number of patents, let alone that it could make Microsoft pay $300 million in patent fees annually."
The special report interviewed several intellectual property experts. A professor from Tsinghua University's School of Law made a widely circulated statement: "The 402 patent strategy is not defensive, but offensive. Defensive patents are used to prevent others from suing you, while offensive patents are used to make the market operate according to your rules. In this sense, 402 has already seized the rule-making power of the global technology industry."
The top trending topic on Weibo remained there for a full day. A Chinese company ranked first globally in annual patent applications for the first time. The most upvoted comment was: "Before, we paid patent fees to foreigners; now, foreigners are paying us. This feels great."
At two in the morning, Zuo Cheng sat alone in his office. On the system panel's civilization perception interface, all directions representing standard-setting power had turned dark, and the color of the Americas was gradually deepening. He wrote a line in his memo: Patents are not the end, but the fuel for the next round of research and development. Five billion US dollars will be invested entirely in cutting-edge exploration.
He closed his laptop. Outside the window, the night sky over Hangzhou was slowly traversed by satellites from the celestial constellation, and the pale blue light of the quantum computing center reflected on the river.
On the desk lay a new draft proposal with a title of only four words: Next-Generation Technology.
Zuo Cheng turned to the first page. What was written on the paper wasn't any specific product, but a timeline: feasibility study in nine months, prototype verification in twelve months, and productization in twenty-four months.
He folded the timetable and put it in the drawer. Then he wrote a new name on the second page of the proposal.
The ninth branch.