Hi, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us, both those of you who've been able to make it in person here at the New York Stock Exchange, and those of you that are joining us virtually via the webcast. I'm David Mulholland, Head of Investor Relations here at Nokia, and I'm delighted to have both Nishant Batra, our Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, and also Jenni Lukander, who runs Nokia Technologies. President of Nokia Technologies, I should say. As a reminder, for those that haven't maybe joined these events before, they're very much intended to help you understand our business better, our strategy, our technology and product roadmaps, rather than being particularly focused on our financials. I hope you'll find them very informative either way. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer.
During this event, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding our future business and financial performance, and these statements are predictions that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may therefore differ materially from the results we currently expect. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors. We've identified such risks in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F, which is available on our investor relations website. In terms of the structure for today's event, I'll shortly hand over to Nishant, who will give you a presentation on our technology vision for the future and how we're positioning ourselves to lead in the areas that we think will matter most to networks over the next decade.
As a reminder, in our current operational model, the responsibility for our product-related R&D sits more within the business groups, many of which you've heard from in prior events, where Nishant's organization incorporates our longer-term strategy and technology thinking, including Bell Labs. Jenni will then give you an update on our progress in Nokia Technologies with our overall approach and the progress we've been making into new areas. After that, we'll move to a Q&A section. That's quite a lot to get through. We'll now get started with a short video to set the scene, and I'll then welcome Nishant to the stage.
By 2030, the world as we know it will be dramatically transformed. The metaverse will open up endless opportunities across consumer, enterprise, and industrial sectors. Digital physical fusion and human augmentation will transform how people interact in a combined physical and digital reality. None of this will be possible without the network. It will need to become more intelligent, dynamic, scalable and secure, evolving to enable a rich, multi-party value ecosystem that will unleash innovation and opportunity, creating sustainable solutions for some of the world's biggest challenges, all made possible through Nokia's innovations. This is our vision for 2030. Together, we're creating the future.
Good morning. Thanks for joining us. I'm Nishant. Thanks for the introduction, David. I run strategy and technology at Nokia. I'll talk us through a few slides now, and I've met several of you before. I got the challenge from Paul earlier today that I have to be very consistent with what you heard from me a couple of weeks ago. I'll try my best. I'll talk about not so much regarding the aspect of business in the next year or so, but I'll talk about the way we do this is we look at the market long term, and we build a long-term horizon thinking. We bring it back to midterm and see how the portfolio should evolve, and then how the short-term resource allocation should be. I'll try and connect that over the next 10 slides or so.
I just a brief introduction as to how long I've been with the company now 18 months. I joined January of last year. Prior to that, I was with an auto tech company, and prior to that with Ericsson running the mobile business. This is how my unit is structured. There is a reason why I put up this slide, and that is because prior organization at Nokia, several of these functions were quite dispersed and isolated. What we have tried to do is to find a proper way of building our group strategy, which is driven by a technology vision. That drives what the corporate strategy should be. That's how we then orient the research in the Bell Labs units.
A big part of my unit then is focused on industry standardization, working very closely with Jenni, 3GPP, IETF, ITU, IEEE. Industry standards leading into three or four different aspects into products. That's when a lot of the Bell Labs technologies are then transferred into the BGs. That's on the top left. Some go into incubation and venturing. We've launched our internal incubator, and our internal venture capital has always existed. That's with NGP. I also have the ecosystems and strategy for partnerships. This is a very different world now, so we can't do everything ourselves. Then finally, digitalization and security. So we see this as a circle. It was quite disconnected earlier. The businesses were building products, weren't really thinking about what the 2025 and beyond would be. So we've tried to put some sense to it.
I'll lead you through what we have done internally. This is a lot of what we discuss in the group management team. I'll start with the, how we build our technology, which in a couple of slides on that. We started looking at 2030 and building things backwards from there. A few trends. Let's start with actually the user needs. We started looking at I mean, today we serve the CSP who serves the consumer, we buy a smartphone, and that's how the business goes. We started to say, "Is that the only user that will exist in 2030?" The answer is absolutely no. We actually then looked at four different kind of consumer sets, user sets. Industry, OT, enterprise IT, consumer, and then not to be forgotten, the developer.
I'll delve into that a little bit more because we've all heard about this concept called programmable networks, and that's where the developer comes in. From a user perspective, everything as a service, digital first procurement or provisioning of the service digitally. The experience is not limited to a smartphone. The experience can be much beyond a smartphone, and I'll talk about that in a second. When I say new purchasing priorities, of course, the price is still very, very important. Everybody worries about the cost of the service that they're procuring, but there are other aspects that start to come into play when you evolve your user set to beyond the consumer. For example, in an industrial setting, an enterprise CIO is not looking only at the download throughput. They're looking at an outcome.
Does it serve the purpose of that enterprise CIO for that campus? It's a different user set. We looked at some socioeconomic and geopolitical trends. Deglobalization is an absolute truth today. It's increasing. It impacts supply chains, it impacts standardization, and that's something we keep a very close eye on. We don't want the standards to fragment, for example. That's not good for the business in the industry as such. The other two on the bottom, cybersecurity and sustainability. Cybersecurity is now, let's just say, it's an unnecessary evil that's here to stay. We all have to work with it. It's very much related to the geopolitical situation regarding deglobalization. I run the security for the group, and we've seen a very distinct behavior on our cyber defense center post the war in Europe.
This is something we just have to keep an eye out. It's a huge market as well, by the way. It's nearly EUR 400 billion by the end of this decade. That's another trend that we keep an eye out. Sustainability here is related to largely ecological power profiling of our products. I used to look at this industry about five years back, and I say, "If I have the right product and the right cost, with the performance and the earlier time to market, I'll sell a lot." That's not sufficient anymore. The product has to have the right power profile and has to be secure. Those two additional metrics have come into play. Finally, on the trends, there is the state-driven innovation. This is again related to geopolitical.
A lot of the countries are now launching their own firms, which are now impacting how this industry works. These trends on the left and right, and then the most important ones that we see in the middle, of course, everybody has heard the word metaverse. It's important I talk about it as well, I guess. Let's start with something that is already quite successful today and quite pervasive. That's the cloud. If you go back again four, five years, there used to be a telco world and a cloud world. There is no distinction anymore. Cloud is an absolute part of telecommunications networks. I have put Web 3.0 There as well. This is to be seen. We are monitoring this. Today, the Internet is very much built based on principles of Web 2.0.
We'll see how the tokenization and decentralization of the Internet evolves. It's something to be watched. It's not necessary for the Metaverse to have Web 3.0, but the Metaverse benefits from the tokenization in certain cases. I'll talk about Metaverse in the next slide, so I'm not delving into it. When we kept these trends in mind, 2030, then we started building saying, "What will the traffic in the networks be?" First and foremost, this concept called Metaverse, it's very sexy, this word, but it's really built on two enablers. The first enabler that's on the right here, digital-physical fusion, in very simple words, is digital twinning. To build a Digital Twin of a physical object, and I'll give you guys an example. That creates a lot of traffic on the network.
If you augment the user into that digital twin, that's how you interact with the metaverse. That creates a lot of uplink traffic, for example. We looked at the progression. By the way, this whole term metaverse, I have some colleagues in the back who are from Bell Labs. We've been talking about human augmentation, we've been talking about digital twinning in Bell Labs for a long time now. We just didn't come up with the word metaverse, but that's how we look at it. Today, from a digital physical fusion perspective, there are Digital Twins. I mean, if you just YouTube digital twin, you'll find a Digital Twin of a refinery, a mine, a bridge, a factory. I mean, there are several Digital Twins that exist today already.
From a human augmentation, I'm sure we've heard about. You know, head-mounted displays, VR glasses, et cetera. Very early stage. I would say relatively mature on digital twinning already in the world today. Quite early as to how the technology evolves in this case. We looked at 2030, and in 2030, these Digital Twins become far more complex. We look at Digital Twins of cities, for example, for smart traffic monitoring. We're looking at interoperability between different ecosystems in the Digital Twins. They are then augmented, in this case, by, in some cases, industrial exoskeletons. They're augmented in some cases with mixed reality or XR interoperability. This results, in our opinion, not one, but three metaverses or three kinds or three categories of metaverses. The first one everyone's heard of, the consumer metaverse. This is around social entertainment.
This is around gaming. This is how this industry is progressing. The consumer metaverse is very much related to, let's call it wireless opportunities in the industry. Whether it's tethered at home to your home Wi-Fi or mobile outside, that's how the consumer metaverse is built on a wide area network in that sense. The enterprise metaverse, which is IT-centric, this is for collaboration, communication, enterprise training. This is built on a fixed network to an enterprise premises. The final one, the industrial metaverse, which is more OT-centric. This is built not on a wide area network, not on a fixed network, but in our opinion, this is built on a subnet that the industry now famously calls private networks. This is built on a premise that you will need to use, consume, produce data on a premise.
There's an enterprise edge, and then there's a private network that the enterprise owns. I'm not making the distinction here whether it is licensed, whether it's unlicensed, could be either. I'm not making the distinction whether it's 3GPP or IEEE, could be either, depending on the application. I have to say, when the world talks about metaverse, we tend to deviate towards the top right excessively. In our humble opinion, the real metaverse that has already begin to exist is on the bottom right. This goes back to my comment, there are so many Digital Twins that already exist. A lot of industries, physical industries, have started to use exoskeletons combined with Digital Twins. The cost of insurance for back injuries in the U.S. is more than $100 billion. Exoskeletons with Digital Twins helps you solve some of that problem already today.
The maturity of industrial metaverse already there today, and we believe that's the first metaverse that will actually happen. It goes in that order. The consumer metaverse is far from us. The price points, the capability of those VR devices is far from optimal. The way we started looking at how does this impact us? The industrial metaverse bound to happen first, that's our belief. What should we do about that? That means there will be a huge market for private networks that we need to address. The enterprise metaverse, which happens next, does that mean that 25 gig PON goes to 50 gig PON or a 100 gig PON? How does the traffic profile impact what we do on fixed passive optical networks? That's something that we have to think about.
I'll bring it back together to that point in a second. Consumer metaverse is really, in my humble opinion, this is not 5G, this is 5G-Advanced to 6G. I'll show you that. I mean, you can pull off a very good experience, mobile consumer VR experience with what we have today. We started looking at the three markets. I'll start with consumer 'cause it's, let's say, the most understood. That's why. By the way, we tried to overlay these graphs. In these markets, the market sizing is from industry analysts. I will show you from who in a second. We started looking at traffic that this would create. We thought about overlaying this graph with traffic. The market size with traffic in the networks. We didn't have to because they were identical.
The market comes when the traffic comes, and the traffic comes when the market comes. We extrapolated the single largest user of the network today, that's smartphone video, and we said, "If there's 8K video, three hours a day, everybody using a smartphone is consuming video all the time or three hours." That's massive on 8K. The traffic saturates in 2027. That's where we see that by 2028, the usage of the network is dominated with consumer mixed reality versus smartphone 8K video. That changes how we build these networks. We looked at enterprise. Again, this goes back to fixed networks. 9x. We did several in, you know, scenarios. We did a conservative one, we did an aggressive one, but we settled somewhere between 8x and 10x higher bandwidth consumption.
Does that mean that on an average today in a Western economy, you are having a gigabit to home with GPON. A lot of those are being upgraded to 10 gig, many cases 20 gig. Verizon's rolling out 40 gig in some cases. But this means that you would need far more. If I ask this question to my colleagues at Bell Labs, they would say, "You're gonna break the Shannon limit if you get there." We can't. That's the law of physics. That means a lot more fiber needs to be deployed to these enterprises to just serve the need of the enterprise metaverse. By the way, this got accentuated by the pandemic. Pre-pandemic and post-pandemic is very different already. Finally, the industrial metaverse, which I've said is probably the most mature, and that's what you see in the graph as well.
We already see a market for the industrial metaverse. We see a market for industrial devices already, for industrial applications. We announced yesterday on our private network, the way we approach this market, we sell a private network. We've deployed about 1,200 of those. I don't know what the latest count today is because we're adding many per week. We announced yesterday that with the private wireless, we actually announced already some months ago, that we will deliver an edge node. We called it a mixed edge node for edge workloads for the enterprise. That has been a huge success for us in the market. Yesterday, we opened the ecosystem for that enterprise edge node that we deliver as part of our private network, and we are onboarding third-party applications. The first applications that we have onboarded are the mediation software from Siemens for digital twinning.
What we have already onboarded on that enterprise edge device that ships with our private network is the PTC digital twinning software. Because we already see a market. That market exists. We've had a fantastic feedback from the analyst community already that you are approaching this the right way. We're looking at gaining from the opportunity from the right, preparing for the opportunity in the middle, and then standardizing for the opportunity in the left. I wanted to put these timelines in perspective. Really anything that's wireless needs 5G-Advanced, and then the hockey-stick curve will require 6G. Sorry, you were about to take a picture. I will talk about how we see the value chain because it's not just, okay, we understand that there will be traffic on the networks, woo-hoo.
Because traffic has been going up on these networks for as long as I've been in the business. The question is, what are we gonna do about that? How are we gonna, as Nokia? What are we gonna do with our portfolio as a consequence? The first difference that you see, if somebody were to put this slide up, let's say four, five years ago, we would have thought about service provider. That's a very limited view of the world today. We look at these four. The way we looked at four sets of users, we're looking at now four different distinct set of customers. CSP is just one of them, and their requirements are very different. If you sell to a CSP, they will need a small cell, they will need a macro cell.
If you sell to a CSP, they will need a cell site router, they will need an edge router, they will need an aggregation router, a core router. The flexibility and scalability requirements are very different. What these guys are focused on is consumability. Can I get an outcome that I can do something with? When we now sell a private network to a mine, they're not worried about what's the throughput, they're worried about the use cases. They're worried about consuming this for an outcome. Then if you sell to the government, of course, there's no surprise here. They're worried about getting the first product they can get their hands on, the latest 3GPP release. They're worried about. They're not so worried about this. They don't care if it's 3GPP Release 15 versus Release 17 as long as the outcome is met.
The customer set is different. When we start looking at the metaverse in 2030, it's important, it's almost critical that we look at that industry being served not just by the CSPs. That's how we have approached our business strategy, that's how we have approached our product strategy, which I will conclude with. By the way, if you look at these customers, then they lead to a different requirement on the network as well. New services are needed. I'll give you guys a very simple example. Almost all of us will have one or two devices in this room.
If you were to make a 911 call on that device, the PSAP, the Public Safety Access Point nearest to us would locate that you are in the NYSE building. They will say with a few square meters accuracy, the 911 call would go through and say, "This is where the device called from." That's the level of accuracy that you have with the consumer wide area access network. Imagine if you were to take that level of accuracy in terms of localization into a factory, and you had drones communicating with each other, there would be crashes all the time. The localization that that private network needs is centimeter level in three dimensions. Instead of knowing that Paul is in this room, we have to know that the drone is here. That's the change in the network profile that we have to get to.
I also like this example around latency. If you have a healthcare application and you have a latency issue, you have a problem there. Same with reliability. The one time that call needed to go through, it didn't, because it was only five 9's . That's a disaster in many mission-critical applications. The service needs everybody in the consumer world. When you go to a store, whether it's Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, U.S. Cellular, you're looking at what throughput would I get? There's this application, and I'm not gonna promote them, but you can say, "Hey, I'm getting the throughput. That's good. My 5G works." That's just one dimension of the service needs, and that's the promise of monetization of these networks. That requires, like I said, okay, good, we have had a vision. We looked at trends.
We made the Metaverse as part of our vision based on human augmentation and digital twinning. We brought it back to the three industries or three customer sets that we're gonna serve, government being the fourth one. Finally, we said, "What do we need to build then?" We need to build to actually serve this. We need to put our money where our vision is. We can't just keep building uni-dimensionally for performance. There is several aspects. A lot of them are already quite well covered with 5G or with fixed passive optical networks, but not sufficiently. That's where the role of standardization comes, and that's where we think the world will absolutely need 6G as well. I will translate this in the next three slides to actual Metaverse requirements. If you look at, we'll take three examples.
Starting with the consumer metaverse, we take immersive gaming as an example. Here for immersive gaming, you don't need all of those aspects of the network. You need ubiquity. You need very high performance and resilience. In some cases, when you're using haptic devices, you need sensing as well and so on and so forth. So these aspects of the network are important. So what's Nokia gonna do about that? Well, we are already entrenched in the bottom right. We're selling premium connectivity in this case. That's our job. That's our base business. With a lot of these, consumer metaverse will need excessive deployment of the edge. I talked about how we're shipping a lot of enterprise edge, but that's not the multipurpose edge cloud I'm talking about here.
This is very much still, when I say multipurpose edge cloud, this is regional cloud by a cloud provider, and that's where we see a market for us. In this case, we're looking at the market for, you know, tier zero, tier 1, tier N, switching into an edge data center. That's the additional market that comes with the consumer metaverse. We want to complement that with what we call Network as Code for API extraction for programmable networks that we want to sell to CSPs for them to be able to monetize these networks. Because if they're simply selling subscriptions in 2030, this industry will have a problem. They will have to sell APIs together with subscriptions. That's the consumer metaverse. That's the opportunity behind it. We looked at the enterprise metaverse. Gets a little bit more exciting.
The top line comes into play. We don't always then have to go through a CSP to equip an enterprise with a private network. The CSP comes in play if it's licensed. If it's unlicensed, we don't. That's a completely new market for us. There we're selling solutions. Finally, if you look at an industrial network, the attributes of the network are completely different in this case. There, we are actually not selling networks anymore. We're selling platforms. We're selling outcomes. That's what the industry buys. In some cases, we do go direct. In several cases, we actually now go through system integrators and partners. We've announced partnerships and system integration, relationships as GTM for this part of our business. This is just the start. If I go back to that curve, you might get.
You guys might remember, this is just the start of the industrial metaverse. We want our share with it, because the industrial metaverse does not exist without a bloody good network. That market hasn't existed yet. Those three metaverses, three different value chains need a completely different service requirement from the network and new network capabilities. That's how then we build our tech strategy that drives our portfolio. We looked at all of that, and then we said, "Okay, this is our strategy from a technology perspective. What..." I will not go into that. That will be a long time if I start to go through that. What foundational investments would we need? I actually talked about those four foundational investments even at the Capital Markets Day in March last year. Those are investments we are making.
All of us have heard the story of Nokia falling behind on semiconductor. Not anymore. These foundational investments have been ongoing, but those are not sufficient based on what I talked about. We will need transformational investments as well. All of this is driven by not just systems, but software. This is a huge area of investment for us, whether it comes to software for applications or application enablers for private networks, whether it's software to move to 5G-Advanced layer one. It's the single largest investment we have. That has to be complemented through AI. We have Terry in the back of the room who has a full center of excellence of AI that we have instituted now. That's a big area of investment for us. I put consumability on the top because CSPs don't worry about consumability, enterprises do.
We were not so good at it. We need to transform our offering to be consumable by developers, by system integrators. Otherwise, we will not be able to get the fulfillment of the market I just talked about. That's those are the three new areas of investment. What we have done, we have had now several alignment, call it, in a big company, where we're now driving this across business groups, those investments, in research in my unit, and now we're making sure that every product group embraces this. I just want to lay out a few examples. For wireless, I talked about that being important for two of the metaverses, 5G-Advanced, 6G. We announced EasyMesh Wi-Fi, which is basically combining Wi-Fi and 3GPP networks.
In the case of fixed, what we call as Adaptive Fabric that serves the third kind of metaverse, we're talking 25 gig PON. In Bell Labs, we have already demonstrated 100 gig PON. We're also here working on 800 gig and beyond in the optical and on routing, coherent routing. We try to bring this back from a governance perspective as well, because we don't want the product groups to lose sight of what they're building for. In terms of consumability, move as much software to as a service as possible. Move from licensing to subscription. Expose APIs where possible, make them consumable for developers. Our Digital Automation Cloud is the underpinning of our private network offering.
Finally, Jenni will talk about this a lot, our research and development in AV, our research and development in AR/VR devices that we collaboratively work between her unit and my unit. This is built on the fundamental of research coming out of Bell Labs Core and Bell Labs Solutions, which I have learned in my years in the industry, when you find something really good, you wanna make sure that you lead the standards with it. Because you don't want something else to go in the standards, then have to catch up on the product side. This is our tech strategy. This is how we drive long-horizon thinking, midterm portfolio, and short-term resource allocation in the company. That's what I wanted to share with you. I've got a marketing slide that networks is in the middle of everything. That's my conclusion. I hand it to Jenni.
Thanks, Nishant. Nishant introduced himself saying he's been with the company for a short while, but he's been able to accomplish already quite a lot. I've been with the company since 2007, and I am leading the Nokia Technologies business unit. Thank you for joining from my side as well. Today I'm going to talk about the progress we continue to make with monetizing our intellectual property, in particular our industry-leading cellular and multimedia patent portfolios, both in renewing agreements with our past licensing customers, and our initiatives to expand into new areas where our technology is increasingly relevant.
The first thing to say is that the intellectual property is a virtuous cycle, which both fuels and leverages the full value of Nokia's research and technology leadership. We drive value from intellectual property in three ways. Firstly, differentiated products and services which we protect with intellectual property. Secondly, freedom to operate, by which I mean ensuring beneficial terms and conditions if we need to rely on third-party IPR. Thirdly, monetization of Nokia's industry-leading patent portfolio. All three are important, but as you have already heard about our progress in products and services in the other business groups' progress update presentation, so today I will focus on monetization of IPR.
In Nokia Technologies, we license our contributions to industry standards to other companies so that they can then build on our patented inventions without having to conduct their own R&D in those relevant technology areas. In return, they pay royalty fees for the use of our technology and inventions, which we then reinvest in developing the next generation of cellular and multimedia technology. It's a wheel that has been turning for many years, powering the growth of the smartphone industry, consumer electronics, video streaming, connected vehicles, and the wider Internet of Things. It's really no exaggeration to say that all of these are built upon our inventions and contributions to industry standards that Nishan mentioned, along with contributions of others. Before we go any further, just a quick reminder of the scope of Nokia Technologies' remit.
We have monetization programs in three areas: the licensing of our patents, the licensing of our proprietary technology, and the licensing of the Nokia brand. Of the three, patent licensing is by far the biggest contributor to our highly profitable and sustainable licensing business, and will be the focus of my presentation today. Working together with Nishant's organization, Nokia Bell Labs, and the other Nokia business groups, Nokia Technologies also has responsibility for ensuring that Nokia remains a leading innovator and contributor of technology to industry standards. We also drive incubation of new technologies, especially in the area of multimedia. For example, we are developing immersive video and audio technologies and piloting new use cases. Nokia is a technology leader and an innovation powerhouse.
For more than 30 years, we have defined many of the fundamental technologies used in any device that is connected to a cellular network, and we take a leadership role in standard-setting with our standardization experts holding more than 100 board member and other senior positions across all key standardization bodies. We are very, very much focused on resolving the most complex technical problems and coming up with fundamental high-quality inventions. As a result, we own one of the broadest and strongest patent portfolio in the mobile communications sector with around 20,000 patent families, including over 4,000 patent families declared as essential to 5G as of today, and a strong set of multimedia standard essential patents and implementation patents.
The portfolio has a long lifetime with the vast majority of patents still in force in 10 years' time, and we continue to refresh the portfolio with new inventions every year. Last year alone, we filed patent applications on more than 1,500 new inventions, and we expect to file even more in the future as we continue to invest heavily in R&D and standardization.
The scope of Nokia's R&D activities includes enhancements and new capabilities for existing products, the development of new products, software and technologies and our important contributions to open industry standards. Here our researchers and standardization experts are currently heavily engaged in shaping 5G-Advanced, which is due to be released in 2024, and 6G, where we are the project leader of, for example, the European Commission's flagship Hexa-X 6G program. When it comes to future multimedia standards, we are working in areas such as video and audio coding, extended reality, and video coding for machines. When it comes to assessing the strength of patent portfolios, the one thing that I always tell to people is that it's not just about quantity.
You have to look at the quality of the patents, because some patents are more relevant, are more fundamental, and therefore more valuable than others. In fact, some companies in the industry over-declare, claiming the relevance of lots of patents even though they may not be truly inventive or not genuinely relevant to the standard. Quality is really crucial, and at Nokia we are very much focused on quality. At our Capital Markets Day event last year, I spoke about how several independent studies have confirmed the strength of our portfolio, and since then, a further study by PA Consulting has concluded that Nokia is number one for the ownership of granted patents that they found essential to the 5G standard.
As part of our focus on high-quality patents, we announced last summer that we have achieved ISO 9001 certification, the world's best-known standard for quality management, for our patent portfolio management process. This independent certification assessed every step of Nokia's patent portfolio management process, covering the entire lifetime of the patents. We are one of the first companies who have achieved this standard, which is another strong indication of the quality of our portfolio. In addition, one other measure of strength of a patent portfolio is to prove the value of your inventions in court. This is something that Nokia has successfully achieved over many years, including our dispute with Daimler, where the courts found in our favor.
Most recently in our ongoing dispute with OPPO, where two German courts have recently ruled that OPPO is using Nokia's patented technologies in its smartphones and is selling them without a license. As recently as this week, a Dutch court delivered a similar judgment against OPPO. In summary, Nokia is one of the few companies that year after year with numerous patents has been able to convince courts of the relevance and high quality of our inventions, resulting in positive outcomes for us. As I mentioned earlier, as well as our strength in cellular technology, we also have a strong multimedia patent portfolio. In particular, we excel in video standards, including video compression technology that enables large data files to be shared across the internet.
Without this technology, you couldn't stream high-definition video or hold a video conference meeting, and machine-to-machine video could not be possible. We all were able to work remotely over video during the COVID period thanks to Nokia engineers having invented fundamental video technologies that make high-speed video image transfer over the internet possible. Our video research and standardization has been recognized with numerous international awards, including five Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, two of which we've received in the past two years. We continue to make good progress with our licensing efforts in this area. In March last year, we announced a patent license agreement with Samsung, which covers the uses of Nokia's video technologies.
This deal is separate to our smartphone license agreement with Samsung, and since then, we have also agreed licenses with Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, Technicolor, and a well-known Asian consumer electronics company. Given the fundamental strength of our multimedia inventions and the role they play in supporting video streaming and delivery, there is considerable scope to grow our licensing coverage beyond consumer electronics devices to other segments that rely upon our technology. To bring this to life, I thought that I show you a short video.
Got my first computer when I was eiight. I soon started programming, even though I hardly know how to read English, but I got it working, and that was the start of my career. 20 years ago, it took half an hour to download one single image. Audio compression and video compression were just emerging those days. Today, three-quarters of the mobile traffic is video. That's why video compression is so critical. For the last 20 years, Nokia has been leading the evolution of video codecs. I've been working with video compression since the early days. I have been one of the key architects in H.264 as well as H.265 and the successor, H.266.
The video coding and video technologies that Nokia has contributed to over the last 30 years, they are integrated into a billion devices every year and are really in the heart of all multimedia applications and services. Codecs have enabled digitization. Without them, we would be in a completely analog world. We wouldn't have video on demand. We wouldn't have multimedia services in place. File sizes would be enormous. Video conferencing wouldn't be possible. We would have the video compression from the 1990s. No one wants to see video compression from the 1990s. These technologies that we have developed and standardized enable us to compress video by 99% that then can be delivered to consumers. The question that we are facing today is can artificial intelligence actually improve video coding standardization? We are developing neural networks to tune the codecs to improve the compression even further.
I think that eight-year-old myself would have probably thought that that's absolutely fantastic and cool what a close to 50-year-old me is doing nowadays.
To reiterate, we have an industry-leading patent portfolio spanning cellular standards, multimedia technologies, and device-related technologies, and network technologies. The technologies within these four categories include connectivity, user interface, antenna security, AI, machine learning, sensing and sensors, multimedia, and many other emerging technologies. A significant portion of our portfolio are standard essential patents, inventions that have been contributed to industry standards like 5G, and that have to be used in order for a device or service to comply with these standards. In practice, this means that any device that is connected to any cellular network automatically uses Nokia's intellectual property and requires a license and a royalty payment. The same is true of our multimedia assets that were showcased here in the video.
For example, video streaming would not be possible without our inventions. These technologies are really essential building blocks for entire industries, smartphones, connected cars, other connected devices and services. None of this would work without our patented inventions. The same is likely to be true in the future, with the metaverse that Nishant talked about, where our cellular and multimedia technologies are expected to play a fundamental role. Now moving on to monetization. Our successful mobile devices licensing program is the core of our business and provides strong, recurring revenue. As you can see from this chart, we have a proven, track record for continually renewing our agreements, with licensing agreements in place, with most major smartphone vendors like Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi.
In Q3 2020, we renewed a major license agreement in a way that demonstrates the strength of our 5G portfolio. Now, as the adoption of 5G increases, we will continue to add 5G as a new technology to our future agreements, including our renewals. Licensing of 5G represents a good opportunity for us as its licensing coverage in our agreements is still fairly low. As I briefly mentioned already, we are currently in dispute with OPPO and vivo over the renewal of their licenses in multiple jurisdictions. While our aim is always to negotiate our agreements amicably, it is inevitable that sometimes we have to resort to courts to protect our rights.
As I mentioned, two German courts have ruled that OPPO is using Nokia's patented technologies without a license, and that Nokia has acted fairly in negotiations. In fact, the German courts have so far found OPPO having infringed five of our patents in total. Just this week, we received another positive judgment with two of our patents in the Netherlands. We remain confident of a positive outcome and are, of course, hoping to resolve the matter soon. That said, the company will prioritize protecting the value of our intellectual property rather than achieving certain timelines. Now, let's look at what's coming up in terms of renewals. The duration of our agreements varies from three to 10 years.
To put that into context, and as we said at the Capital Markets Day last year, on a five-year rolling average, around 15%-20% of our top line each year represents existing large deals that are coming up for renewal. This renewal cycle has started and will continue for the next couple of years. We are well-placed to negotiate these renewals thanks to the continued investment in our portfolio and leading position in technologies such as 5G. Our ambition is to work proactively with our licensees to renew these deals, and we are well prepared.
As we have seen this year, there can be volatility in our financial results depending on how these renewal discussions develop and the volume of renewals ongoing at any one point in time, and whether we need to litigate or not can influence our costs. For us, the critical point is that we will always look to protect the value of the portfolio. As well as showing our renewal track record, this slide also highlights the changes in our cash payments to the revenue ratio, here at the bottom, for the past eight years. We had some large deals in the past, where we took cash in at the beginning of the contract period, resulting in the revenue recognition and cash generation not being in sync.
In other words, we received large prepayments in cash at the beginning of the contract term for some past agreements, but we recognize these royalties as net sales over the lifetime of the agreement. This gap is expected to reduce in 2022, but there does remain a delta, which this year we currently expect to be around EUR 450 million. Going forward, we remain open to different contract and payment structures, but our ambition is to have a closer alignment between profit recognition and cash generation. Now moving on to areas we see opportunities to grow in. We have made a lot of progress in our growth areas of automotive and consumer electronics over the past 18 months. In automotive in particular, we have had a significant momentum.
In June last year, we announced a bilateral licensing agreement with Daimler. This important milestone followed a lengthy legal battle which ended in our favor and which then effectively made the market. Since the Daimler deal was announced, we have struck another bilateral agreement with another major automotive OEM. In addition, Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, and a number of smaller players have agreed licenses with the Avanci pool, of which we are a leading member and which we have continued to make available for automotive OEMs as an alternative to our bilateral licensing. While licensing maturity is now increasingly high in the automotive space, there remains significant revenue growth opportunities for us.
For example, additional automakers agreeing licenses, the growth in the number of connected vehicles on the road increasing our royalties, and the future adoption of 5G, as almost all connected vehicles are still 2G, 3G, or 4G. In our consumer electronics program, again, we continue to make good progress. As I mentioned earlier, we have concluded a number of agreements over the past 18 months, including deals with Samsung, Lenovo, Technicolor, and an Asian consumer electronics firm. I am confident that more deals will follow in both of these areas. Beyond consumer electronics and automotive, the wider IoT sector will also significantly expand our long-term addressable market from dozens of companies to hundreds of potential licensees, but it will take time to unlock the potential in this area.
We expect to use a combination of bilateral agreements and licensing pools. To put our progress into context, our business in these new growth areas was negligible in 2018, and has grown to over EUR 100 million in the past 12 months. Before I wrap up, a few words on our future. As you have seen in our earlier outlook assumptions, we expect largely stable operating profit in Nokia Technologies over the long term. It should be noted, though, that there can be volatility in the business year to year depending on how quickly we are able to progress with renewals and signing new agreements. The renewal cycle has started and will continue for the next couple of years.
We will have to reflect how the smartphone market has evolved, while we also look to grow simultaneously in the new areas that I just talked about. There are clearly risks, but also opportunities ahead of us. We believe that this is the most balanced outlook assumption for the business as we see it today. Now I'd like to finish with a quick three-point summary of why I believe that we are well-placed to continue to succeed in the long term. First, Nokia has an industry-leading patent portfolio with high-quality cellular and multimedia assets. Continued investment in 5G, 6G, and in multimedia research will ensure the portfolio remains strong and sustainable in the future.
Secondly, the renewal cycle has started and will continue, but we have done this before, and as you saw from my earlier slide, we have a proven track record for continually renewing our agreements with licensing agreements in place with most major smartphone vendors. In cases where litigation has been necessary, our litigation track record is strong. Thirdly, our fundamental cellular and multimedia inventions enable entire industries, which provides us with the opportunity to expand our licensing coverage, and we are making good progress in the growth areas, automotive, consumer electronics, and so on, which are now providing a meaningful financial contribution to our business with over EUR 100 million in net sales over the past 12 months.
When you put these three things together, a leading portfolio, proven track record, and progress in growth areas, it adds up to a highly profitable and sustainable licensing business, which continues to deliver value to shareholders, industry partners, and the next generation of inventors. Thanks for listening. Now I'm going to hand back to David for the Q&A. David, over to you.
Thank you, Jenni, and Nishant for both of your presentations. Obviously, I hope you can see the importance of everything that Nishant's organization is working on today in building the future of 5G-Advanced and 6G, and how that then builds into Jenni's business over time when it comes to licensing. We will now move to the Q&A session, so I welcome both Jenni and Nishant back to the stage with me. As a reminder, these events are intended to be focused on our products, technology, and strategy, and I would ask that you would focus your question on areas relevant to Jenni and Nishant's areas of responsibility.
For those present in the room, please raise your hands if you'd like to ask a question, and Tom and Cindy will make their way to you with a microphone. I would ask that you would please announce your name and the firm you work for before asking your question. For those connected virtually, please email me your questions and I will ask those on your behalf to Jenni and Nishant. We'll take our first question from Paul in the front, please.
I appreciate it. Paul Silverstein, Cowen. Jenni, given the increasing pervasiveness of technology, if we think about industrial automation and all the areas technology is going into, why wouldn't the long-term outlook. If I heard you correctly, you all are expecting stable operating profitability from your IPR licensing, et cetera. Why wouldn't there actually be growth and prominent growth over the long term?
Yeah, thank you for the question. The outlook assumption is based on our current visibility of the market. We have successfully expanded our licensing base in recent years, and we believe that we will be able to grow also in the future. At the same time, there are also uncertainties related to the market, especially in the smartphone market, deal timing, and so on, which make it difficult for us to make predictions.
Did you have a follow-up, Paul?
I'll leave it at that. I'll take the rest offline. Thanks.
Cool. We'll take our next question from Andrew at the back with Tom.
Thank you. Andrew Gardiner from Citi. One for both of you, if that's all right. First Nishant, you sort of outlined the portfolio and how you intend to go to market to cater to these new metaverse markets. Nokia's got a pretty unique product portfolio, sort of very broad. I can see how that could cater to these customers. I understand it's quite early, but how would you assess the competitive dynamics there? You know, who do you anticipate running up against when you're going into these customers?
It's a very good question. The way we look at it is, I mean, if you go back earlier this year at Mobile World Congress, everybody announced. Everybody who could spell private networks announced a private networks offering, so to say. Let's segment the space a little bit. There's a space that is licensed private networks where the CSP plays. Then in that space is really our today traditional competitors. Because to have that breadth of radio portfolio, it's not possible for upstarts or even some of the large, let's say, West Coast companies, to have 70 frequencies every year. So that market, licensed market, goes very much to the traditional competitors. We have done very, very well there because our traditional competitors haven't generally looked at the market the same way we have.
Early studies in the market say that we are leaders in the space. There is the unlicensed space in that. That's in some cases small and medium enterprise, but possibly larger ones as well. In the unlicensed space, you could see that there are new competitors that could come in. That's where the importance that you just don't offer connectivity. If you're limited to connectivity, it starts to get commoditized in the years out. We have already complemented our product portfolio with connectivity, with Edge and software enablement on top. New players potential in the unlicensed space, but licensed space is the traditional competitors that you would say.
Thank you. Jenni, for you, just to perhaps follow up on Paul's point there. You spoke about how the newer areas of auto and consumer have grown from next to nothing a few years ago to EUR 100 million over the last 12 months. Yet still, you know, more growth to come because it's still relatively early. A lot of those deals have only just been signed. By, you know, again, sort of looking at a stable level of profitability for the overall group, it seems like you're implying the traditional smartphone business will indeed decline. Now, obviously, units are weak at the moment, given where we are in the cycle. Is it, you know, is that reasonable? Are you just being cautious?
I mean, it feels like with what you're describing with 5G, 5.5G onto 6G, there's still plenty of value that you're delivering to this ecosystem. Why in time would it not grow?
Of course, our ambition is to grow. At the same time, this is a business where you have both risks and opportunities. When you put all of that together, that's how we landed our balanced assumptions. We believe that's the best assumption for the business, as it is, as we see it today.
We'll take our next question from Simon. Go ahead, Simon.
Thank you very much. Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Two also for me. First, maybe this is sort of getting at the same thing a different way. But can you quantify what the Huawei licensing or IPR revenue was at the peak and how that's changed over time? How much of that have you been able to essentially make up as market share went to other smartphone competitors, to Huawei as they were facing their own challenges? Trying to get a better understanding of your current or past relationship with Huawei and then where it's going. How much are you licensing from Huawei in terms of 5G technology? I'm trying to understand that net. Then I've got a follow-up.
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on Huawei because these agreements are confidential. The Huawei situation is reflected in our business outlook. Of course, always when we renew agreements, so we will have to reflect how the smartphone market has evolved and then negotiate the agreements accordingly.
Okay. Then maybe just a follow-up for Nishant. This is maybe more of kind of an organizational question. In terms of the way the company is now structured and each business unit being measured on its own performance, I'd like to get a sense of how you address coordinating across the business units. Do you have business unit CTOs and deputies under them? And how do you address the opportunities to coordinate versus the need to measure each organization on its own merits?
It's a brilliant question. There's coordination required across several dimensions. First and foremost, technology. There are several common technology components that the portfolio has, even if they're spread across different business groups. I run for the company two important forums, the Nokia Tech Council, and each business group CTO reports into that. That's where we coordinate on what's common, how do we make sure we are not reinventing the wheel in places. Many discussions around potential synergies on the tech front. I also run the tech committee with the board, where these thoughts come together. There is also coordination for business strategy. This is done at the GLT level. We want to make sure that we are not replicating go-to-market and stuff like that. There is coordination on strategy and tech.
There is also coordination around digital, which one would think is the easiest because there's a common IT platform for the company. I can tell you that part is the hardest part, but we have actually improved a lot over the last 18 months. Each of the business groups have a chief operating officer, except ESNIs, because it's not as expansive and operational in nature. The other three do. The digital and security components are the run-through of forum called COO forum that is chaired by the CDO of the company in my organization. Digital strategy and technology. There are others, but these three are top of mind, I would say.
Thank you, Simon. We'll take our next question from Mikhail. You go ahead.
Hi. The question for Nishant. Nishant, you mentioned a lot of demand growth and demand on the networks being placed from the metaverse ongoing in the future. If you look at, you know, video, which is now three-quarters of all the, you know, mobile network demand, and we look at how it's gone from arguably, you know, very low six, seven years ago to being where it is today, we haven't quite seen it translate into, you know, it driving more capacity investments, more equipment, so on and so forth. You could argue it was because, you know, the equipment was far more capable, and the spectrum usage was far more efficient than what maybe was imagined.
What's the risk of, you know, metaverse going through a similar kind of dynamic where you could have, you know, all the demand increase, you know, that we have seen in video occur just like in metaverse as well, but, you know, the equipment, the efficiency, you know, improve such that, you know, it curtails the effect and the demand that it has on your.
It's a very good question again. There are two factors at it. Let's first start with the context that the spectral efficiency, the capability of the equipment, the capability of the technology will continue to grow. That just will happen. It's not like we can sort of put a ceiling to that and then start monetizing on top. That will not happen. In fact, here's the fact that not a lot of people know. If you look at wireless networks, most of the capacity added in the wireless networks over the last decade is by adding new spectrum. Most of the capacity is added that way. The second largest contributor is some technology called MIMO. It's basically spatial multiplexing of antennas. Technology will continue to improve and spectrum will come in.
Let's just make sure that keeps happening, because if that doesn't happen, we'll have a problem in serving the traffic. There are two new factors from a business perspective that come into play. A, we were serving a set of customers that were using our products to offer a service in the market. Those customers then tried to say, "Look, we're offering a service, but we're not able to monetize as much of that service." OTT players or video players were. And then some tried to go and acquire maybe less successfully. Those players are smarter now. I can tell you that's why the concept of API exposure is critical. It's not just that they can monetize using subscriptions, they have to monetize these investments using APIs. That's why you saw in several from the slides called Network as Code.
That's one thing that's gonna happen in the market. We already start to see that. The second thing is, we're now increasing the set of customers quite substantially. We're not just going to a customer that will use our product to offer a service. In several cases, the enterprises will actually use it for consumption as an outcome. It's the new market in this case for some of the metaverse examples I gave. Also, we have seen that the cloud comes in, and that becomes an entirely new market. There's an expansion of the market, and then where there was value leakage in the previous generations to either OTT or content players, there is now learnings and intelligence in that customer set that they shouldn't allow it to happen in the next generation again. That's what we are counting on.
Just one follow-up I have to that. When you look at the vision that you have, you know, for how networks will evolve and require to evolve in the future, it seems to me that there is going to be a requirement to have a very, very strong capability across both fixed and wireless. Arguably, it seems that you're alluding to a world where you will start having SLA agreements that the network equipment vendor would have to provide and guarantee, you know, for the quality of experience, et cetera. I'm curious to understand how, you know, whether or not it's fair, you know, that view that you would require to have capabilities in both in order to succeed in that world going forward.
You know, therefore, how do you see Nokia being competitively positioned then, you know, versus, you know, some of the others who arguably lack one or the other?
I will add a third dimension to it. When I think of 2025 and beyond, three capabilities are gonna be necessary, fixed and wireless from access perspective, and add to that cloud. Those three, whether it's the central cloud, regional cloud, edge cloud, enterprise edge, far edge cloud, those three are gonna be necessary. We are now in a. The behavior of the industry cannot be led by one access type or one central cloud type. It is systemic. To have that knowledge of that system is immensely beneficial. What are you gonna put on the edge cloud? If you do put something on the edge cloud, you're lowering the transport requirements, but you're increasing the processing requirement on the edge for latency or for privacy reasons. What are you gonna bring back?
You're increasing the transport cost, and the access cost goes down. That system value is massive. That's what we differentiate on actually now in several ways. I will give you one simple example. When we build the 20 gig port or 25 gig port, we're not just simply thinking of it as a fiber access to an enterprise or home. We're thinking of it multiplex with transport. Because the pipe's gonna be big enough for us to do that. Those systemic aspects are very beneficial when you have both accesses and a knowledge of the cloud and software piece.
Thank you, Mikhail. I'm gonna take a few questions that have come in on email so far. So this one's to you, Nishant. It's come from Sami Sarkamies at Danske Bank. Most of the management focus during the last four years has been on restoring 5G product competitiveness in mobile networks, which has now achieved to catch up relative to rivals. What areas are next in line, i.e., require similar attention and potentially incremental R&D investments in order to ensure competitiveness?
I think it's three areas that come to mind, actually. First, I think the question is, we had a challenge with wireless. We have overcome that. Where else do we feel challenged? Let's start with that. I think we could do better optical as a business. That's an area that we're investing in to gain competitiveness as well. We have a benefit on our side here. I'm not gonna call it luck. It was thought through by some predecessor of mine, I'm sure. That having both IP routing and optical in our portfolio, and as the two converge, at least for sub-metro links, we have a benefit there. Optical, we have to get competitive.
We're investing to get competitive, but the convergence of IP and optical on short-haul links will benefit as well. The second area, I mean, of course, we've gotten competitive at wireless. Wireless journey hasn't ended. Now we have said we're competitive, but we want to now make sure that we are market leading in 5G-Advanced. That's the message inside of research. That's the message inside of licensing. That's the message inside of standardization and inside of product. We will now not be catching up in 5G-Advanced. We will lead the market in 5G-Advanced, and that is extremely critical for us to do that. I think those three areas I feel are critical for us to continue to invest in.
Thank you, Nishant. The next question comes from Daniel Djurberg at Handelsbanken. It's to you, Jenni. He's asking: How do you think about the risk of patent cliffs in the business, particularly into the second half of this year and next year? Whether there's a lot of 2G, GSM or even 3G standard essential patents that we might not be able to bring forward, from Release 18 and onwards. Maybe if you could just talk a little bit about how your confidence is in the portfolio from that perspective.
We are one of the broadest and strongest patent portfolios in the mobile communications sector. As I mentioned, it's with around 20,000 patent families and over 4,000 patent families declared as essential to 5G. We continually are renewing the portfolio with substantial investments in R&D of EUR 4 billion last year, including areas such as 5G, 6G, and multimedia. As I mentioned, the portfolio has a long lifetime with the vast majority of the patents still in force in 10 years' time. In 2021, we filed patent applications with more than 1,500 new inventions. In the future, we are expecting to file even more as we are currently investing heavily in R&D.
Thanks, Jenni. Any more questions from Daryl? Please go ahead.
Thank you for doing this. This is Daryl Armstrong with Ashler Capital. I have a question for both. Nishant, on the product portfolio slide, you talked about AR/VR devices. Should we think about the business model there being more of a brand or IP licensing, or would you expect that Nokia would be much more involved in actually having their own products brought to market? I have a follow-up.
Yeah. Two areas from a device perspective that, of course, Jenni should comment on the brand side for the other devices as well, if you wanna license our brands there. Actually three. The brand is one aspect, but there is also technologies that we can license from a device technology perspective to device manufacturers. This we feel is a market for us, having fundamental device tech for industrial and consumer devices of the future. There is today, when we ship private networks, in several cases, we actually ship, not in volume, but ruggedized high quality industrial devices as part of a private network. Now device is not the main reason why we're selling it's the private network and the edge context that we're selling that portfolio. But in some cases, we do ship ruggedized, industrial devices with it as well.
Jenni, do you wanna comment?
No, I think you covered it pretty well.
In terms of the semiconductor strategy, as you mentioned, David did, you know, in the past that created an issue in terms of product competitiveness. Could you maybe just sort of describe how your process has evolved when you think about your semiconductor roadmap going forward, how much of it will be done internally, would you outsource, and how that will shift over time relative to the evolution of the industry that you laid out?
Yeah. It depends on the part of the portfolio here. Where we see value in terms of hardware acceleration, then we have two choices there. When you want to hardware accelerate, you have a choice of doing a custom ASIC or buying a merchant silicon. For example, in certain, let's say layer one, mobile or with our packet forwarding. We will stick with custom silicon. We know we have leading edge now. We've always had leading edge on the packet forwarding. We launched FP5 recently. We're working towards the next generations. On wireless, we have now a market-leading ASIC, and we want to continue that cadence. I have learned in my history, you don't miss a cadence on ASIC. We will not miss. That's where my 5G-Advanced comment comes into play.
Now, we might need hardware acceleration, but we think that the market has enough merchant silicon possibilities, whether it's coming from one or the other West Coast players, we will go with the merchant silicon in that case. Where we don't need acceleration, the world has two options for CPUs, whether you go Arm-based and x86, we are using both today in our portfolio. What we don't want to do in silicon is realize too late in the game that we have an application we don't have a silicon for. When you have thought about 5G-Advanced, again, that's a good example. The product's supposed to come out early 2025. We started doing the spec last year. That means by end of this year, we should know what the spec of that device is.
That means the tape-out should happen middle of 2023 already, so that the software is ready by. That cadence is necessary.
Jenni, in terms of the OPPO and vivo litigation, when you're winning these cases, are you getting immediate injunctive relief? Are they enjoined from being able to ship into these markets, or is that stayed? I'm just sort of curious there, 'cause that would definitely play into the leverage you have in terms of an ultimate resolution.
Yeah. As I mentioned, we have had several wins so far in both Germany and Netherlands, and we have disputes ongoing in multiple jurisdictions. In Germany, which has a very established good court system, so we have already received several injunctions against OPPO.
Cool. I will take your last question, Mikhail, but you can be the last one in the room.
Thank you.
You caught my eye.
Yeah, Jenni, question for you. There appears to be a perception that, for a brand to enter into a litigation, or to defer the renewal, you know, of a licensing deal is burden-free. Arguably, they would choose to do that every single time. Could you just give a sense for... You know, how do you raise the price for them to, you know, engage in injunctions as opposed to, you know, negotiate on the renewal on fair terms? What's the burden, you know, for your licensors to simply at every renewal point, you know, go into litigation as opposed to, you know, friction-free rolling into the next term?
First of all, I would say that from our side, we always aim to enter into agreements amicably. That's our main goal, and we actually work very hard to get there. The fact that we have a proven track record and a strong track record also in proving the quality of our portfolio in courts, of course, is an advantage that we have. That said, at times with some licenses, it is more challenging and we may at times need to resort to courts to get clarity to the situation and to protect our rights. If you put this into a broader context, since 2017, we have concluded or extended over 150 licenses and only launched six litigation campaigns.
In fact, the vast majority of our agreements are entered into amicably. That certainly is our goal, and we are also very open to use alternative dispute resolution mechanisms such as arbitration to the extent those are available. Always, in these negotiations, you need two parties to agree. If for whatever reason you're not getting there, so then at times you may need to resort to courts, but for us, it's really the last resort.
Thank you, Jenni, and thank you everyone for joining us today, and particularly those that were able to attend in person. I understand neither the New York traffic or the subway system made it particularly easy today, so appreciate the effort you've gone to. I would like to remind you all that during the event today, we have made a number of forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may therefore differ materially from the results currently expected. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors. We have identified such risks in the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 20-F, which is available on our investor relations website. With that, thank you for joining us.