Hi, everyone, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for the third day of Needham's Twenty-Sixth Annual Growth Conference. My name is Nick Doyle. I'm part of the semiconductor team here at Needham. It's my pleasure to introduce InterDigital. The company develops mobile and video technologies that are at the core of devices, networks, and services worldwide. On Tuesday, the company announced positive preliminary results, including net income above the previous guide. Joining me from the company is Liren Chen, CEO. Liren's going to go through about a thirty-minute company presentation, and we'll use the remaining time to answer as many questions as we can. Liren, thanks for joining us. Take it away.
Thank you, Nick. Good afternoon. My name is Liren Chen. Rich, our CFO, just walked in, so he's our head of IR and Brent. I appreciate everyone here, and I know it's a long day. I know some of you guys have to travel, so I appreciate your time, and more importantly, I appreciate your interest. Before I get into my presentation, may I get a raise of hand to see how many of you in the audience have heard of InterDigital? That's pretty good. All right, so let me just give you my view for InterDigital. I joined the company three years ago.
We have done a lot of work, but I'll give you a holistic view, and I try to do my presentation in 25-30 minutes, so we have, you know, plenty of time for questions. All right, so, here's who we are. We are a technology company. Our technology is in the center of a number of different devices and services and use cases. We are currently on a very good track to get to a fairly large recurring revenue opportunity. We're currently at more than $400 million, about $430 million with our latest announcement. We have a clear path to go to $650 million for recurring revenue in the next three years. In the meantime, we have a very good greenfield opportunity that's very, very large for cloud services and streaming services.
Frankly, that leveraging similar technology and frankly, the same patent portfolio, which I'll touch on. Okay? At the core of our business, we are a company of 51 years old. We celebrate ourand our 50-year anniversary last year, and we have some of the best inventors, best innovators in our industry, which I'll touch on. On a percentage basis, we actually have the highest concentration of inventors in any company that I know. As an independent research company and licensing company, we are actually the largest in the world. Right? So we have a very large patent portfolio. It's about 30,000 assets and covering, you know, very important technology, wireless, radio, artificial intelligence. But more importantly, we keep on adding value to that patent portfolio. Any given day, we add more inventions to it, which I'll give you more color to it at a later time.
We have created a lot of momentum, and we have a very experienced field. I joined InterDigital three years ago, and before that, I was at Qualcomm for 25 years. And Rich is our CFO, has been our CFO for almost 12 years. Been at the company for 20 years, and I have a later slide to show some of the key execs with industry experience. And then finally, it's obvious, always important to talk about capabilities, potential, but really important, deliver value, deliver numbers, deliver awareness, deliver revenue growth. We will demonstrate to you our track record and for the last three-five years, and also hopefully build more confidence, more progress from now for the future. Right, let me explain at the highest level our business model. We are a technology company. We do fundamental research. What does that even mean?
That means we try to lead the industry by at least three-five years. We try to solve the most important problem in the system. In the wireless system, it's about how do you make the best efficient use of the spectrum, which is the thing you cannot reproduce. It's government auctioned off. You can make more chips, you can install more base stations, but you cannot manufacture more spectrum. So our engineers focus on making the best use of the spectrum, okay? In the radio system, there's a similar analogy, okay? Over 80% of internet traffic is driven by radio traffic. So to find the best use, most reliable use, most low-latencyit use of the radio content delivered over the network, being consumed, being created, it's an enormously valuable, enormously challenging problem, so we are best at solving that problem.
What we do next is we share our technology through the standard process. I'll touch on, which is the bottom side of the screen. Our engineers go to standard meetings, and they work with other people in our industry to get our technology become part of the technical standard. That can be satellite standard, that can be Wi-Fi standard, it can be radio standard. And then our standard eventually gets adopted by people who make product in compliance with the standard. That can be cell phone, that can be TV, that can be many other devices, connected Internet of Things, and frankly, that can be online services.
Okay, on the top side, we build one of the largest and most valuable patent portfoliosof , keep on adding value to it, and we try to license our patent portfolio to the implementer, getting paid a fair price, and we put the money back into R&D, and to keep the cycle going. That's our business model. All right, as I said, we are the largest independent research company in the world, and we have been in business for 51 years old.... We invest half the money we receive from recurring base back into R&D, into building, enhancing, and expanding our patent portfolio. More than half the our employees are engineers, and more than 90% of those engineers are inventors. That means they have at least one invention or more while working for us. That's the highest concentration of inventors in any other company, higher than any other company.
In most companies, the inventor population of the overall employees is a single-digit percentage. Okay? This is who we are, and I'm naming sort of five leaders, four leaders of the company. I joined the company three years ago. Before that, I was running the global IP function for Qualcomm. I was there, as an inventor, I was there as a patent portfolio manager, I was there as a licensing person, I was there, frankly, trying to solve a lot of geopolitical challenges, particular issues in China. Rich, who sits in the audience here, is our long-time CFO and, extremely well-respected, one of the best in our industry. And then Eeva Hakoranta used to run Nokia Licensing Business, which is the second-largest licensing business in our industry behind Qualcomm. And then lastly is Rajesh Pankaj, whom I recruited since I joined the company.
He's our CTO. Of all the inventors I, you know, mentioned earlier, they all report into his team. Rajesh spent 25 years at Qualcomm, where he ran the largest technology developing platform in the world, and he ran the global R&D function for Qualcomm. I think most people in our industry would agree that's the most advanced research team in the world. Right, this is just a few names. As I said, standard is important to us, and getting standard leadership role is important. So we, as a company, are members of more than 100 standard development organizations. And when we go participate, we participate, we try to lead the organization, and those are just some of our leaders. I'll highlight a couple, but I can frankly spend the full 30 minutes talk about them because they are really important to our industry.
First, to the left is Diana Pani. She has been elected to run, lead the RAN2, which is one of the three important functions for 5G and 6G standard organization. And, she was the very first female chair of that organization in its 30 years history, and she lead our wireless team, so that's really important. And if you look at the, the one in the middle, the ETSI, the Alain, that's ETSI board member. He's part of the board for ETSI, which is a European-based standard body, who is pioneer for a lot of the wireless field. He's a member of a 27-member board, and our peers are Qualcomm, Apple, and other companies. So we are among the leaders of the industry. Right? And then on the bottom, it's, all the multimedia standard that define the codec.
That's really what enables people to send video content effectively, reliably along a network. We are, as a company, widely recognized for our innovation capability. This is a report published by LexisNexis, which is probably the leading research institution in our field. So two years in a row, we, as a company, are recognized as a top 100 most innovative company worldwide. So we are quite proud of that recognition, and in particular, they said we are the leading patent holders with the highest innovation momentum in the world. So now let's talk about patents. So we have done a lot of work in our patent portfolio, primarily through organic growth. That means our inventor workforce created the invention, we file patent, protect them.
In 2017, we as a company has 19,000 assets, that's patent and applications. By 2023, we have 30,000+ assets. In between, we have done a lot of organic growth. We also have acquired one of the largest and most valuable video codec portfolio, as well as a team in Technicolor, which has a long history in developing groundbreaking work, and it's an extremely well-recognized brand in the media and content industry. Keep in mind, this is not a static portfolio. We have such a large inventor crowd, frankly, we have such a robust machine. Every single day, on average, we as a company, gets five new patents issued to us every single day. So that means our patent portfolio keep on growing and adding value going forward. Okay? Right, patent is unlike anything else in the world.
Patent is unique. Patent, by definition, a patent means you have done something that had never, ever been done before. So we talk about numbers, but more importantly, we need to talk about quality of patent. Our quality of patent determines the value of our portfolio. So again, this third party, this is a company called PatentSight, which is one of the leading research institution. They compare patent portfolio among our industry, among others, you know, who has many important patents or portfolios. Our 5G portfolio is ranked the number one in term of quality in the world. Our video patent portfolio is ranked number three by quality in the world. And by the way, those are different people. So combined, our video plus our wireless assets put us into an extremely strong position. Okay?... All right, let's talk about how do we license.
We have a long history of licensing, and we generally licensing, you know, with large portfolios through very established program. We have been licensing for multiple decades. Many of our customers, you know, I'll name a few in the next couple of slides, have been with us for multiple iteration of technology. They were licensing us when, you know, 2G was important, they were licensing when 3G important, they were licensing 4G, now it's 5G, and going forward will be 6G. Okay? And, and frankly, we are very transparent in our program. We are publicly traded. Our numbers are obviously very accessible, and our customer concentration is fairly well known. We publish our rate on our website, and we treat everyone fairly, and we treat them in non-discriminatory basis. Okay? And a vast majority of our patent license agreement gets signed through bilateral negotiation.
Those are lengthy negotiation, various parties. I'll give you an example. I joined the company three years ago. We have signed more than 30 license agreements since then, and only two of them was a result of litigation. That means the other 90+% was done through bilateral negotiation. Okay? On the rare occasion, we had to litigate, we frankly sometimes don't have a choice when we are after a very lengthy negotiation. They simply use our technologies already in their product. They are infringing our patent. When we file, we are very careful to make that decision, but when we file, our patent has repeatedly found to be valid, infringed, if they are related to standard, to be standard essential by course in different jurisdiction, and, inevitably, in every single occasion, we end up into a license agreement. That's the history of our company.
Okay? Now let's talk about revenue. So we have three licensing programs, but I'll start from bottom up. We are our R&D program, so we have three pillars of research. We spend money, hire engineers, run programs, have, you know, invest in equipment, labs, and development. Our pillar backbone historically has been wireless. We spend money in cellular wireless communication, we spend money in Wi-Fi and other interfaces we research. And then through technical acquisition, we acquire not just portfolio, but also the team, research team. So we are leading innovator in video research. That means video, primarily video codec. This is the standard, the algorithm that allow you to compress signal and send it over the network and decompress it before you can display it. And our technology allow people to compress the content with as 100-to-1 ratio.
You only use 1% of the bandwidth to get you the same quality of content. So that's our second leg. And our third research is artificial intelligence, and, we are not competing with ChatGPTs or Googles or Microsoft, but we are using AI capability to solve the wireless fundamental problems, and we are using AI capability to solve video fundamental problems. I'll give you an example. So traditionally, video codec is just compressing signal account to pixels. But now the AI capability is allowing us to see that's a human face, that's a moving car in the video. By knowing what's the object, you can apply different algorithm, different resolution, different sensitivity, and to actually give you the better experience. So now the video codec is not just treating those pixels as black and white dots or colored dots, they actually know what object they are encoding.
Similar things can be used in the wireless system, because wireless historically built on signal-to-noise ratio. It's based on how strong signal is. It doesn't really built in based on how the user is using the device, what's the use pattern, how this is, you know, Thursday. That is Thursday, right? It's Thursday, 4:00 P.M., you know, he generally listen to music in this time of the day or watch certain video, or it's in the morning, he's commuting, and this traffic pattern in the city is like this. So the intelligence of the network can be built in if you have the AI capability. On the flip side, when we design the video system, the wireless system, we now can target AI as a user. Historically, video system is built with human being as the user.
Therefore, you make assumptions about how many frames per second you need to refresh the screen. Your human eyeball is not capable of processing faster. How many depths of color can you use? But now with AI as a user, we can actually customize the video and wireless system to make it more effective. Why this is important? Because with autonomous vehicle driving, with the cars able to detect object, it's not human being making those determination. It's your sensing system. And one day, that sensing system will be better than human eyes. So you want to make sure the enabling system is built for it. That's codec, that's wireless system. Okay? On top of all the groundbreaking innovation, we built one of the largest portfolio, as I referred to, and we license for different verticals. That's very important.
Many people ask me a question to say, "You have 5G patent, therefore, that's equal to a smartphone use case." It's right, but it's only partially right, because our video portfolio is also applicable to smartphones. You know, people use phones to watch video, and we bring the same asset. By the way, it's true also in our non-smartphone use case. We have TVs. TV obviously display video, but TVs today also have Wi-Fi built in. So partially, our Wi-Fi assets, wireless assets are applicable to TV. So if you notice our announcement for the Samsung TV license we just did, we get paid for our, you know, TV-related, you know, video technology, but we also get paid for our Wi-Fi technology. So that's an important thing. That's a leverage of our business.
You build the technology, build the patent portfolio, then you are enabling, applying for different use case with multiple technology as enabler. Okay? Our recurring revenue for $650, we are currently about $430. That's recurring portion. We do have catch-up payment. Catch-up payment means if they have been using our technology for a long period of time, haven't paid us, when we sign them for the first time, we try to get paid for the past infringement of our patent, past use of our technology. That's generally one time, so we label them catch-up. But we want to build a recurring model also. So both side of the value of money is important, but that's in our device side, okay? Our target for three years for the device with smartphone, consumer electronic and IoT is $650. We are today at $430.
In three years, we should be able to get there. On the right-hand side is the long-term growth for this company. It's the value for the overall ecosystem has increasingly been added, shifted, augmented in the cloud side, in the streaming side. So I think it goes beyond any reasonable doubt that our video technology is super important. We are trying to advance our video delivering service from the network to consumer, whether that's streaming video, that's interactive, user-generated, subscription-based versus ad-sponsored, does not matter, is you're building your value based on our enabling technology. Today, we are not getting paid. We are launching a program, and we hope to recur a lot of value in that industry. It's a very large industry. By 2027, that overall annual sales is projected to be $500 billion. That will be the same size as a smartphone annual sales. Okay?
All right, let's talk about business momentum. I joined the company three years ago, and we have signed more than 30 license agreements. Some of them are big, some of them are relatively small. I'll try to highlight a few. Combined in contract value is more than $2.5 billion. Since 2001, I joined it, we signed Xiaomi, which is the third-largest smartphone maker in the world. They are number one, based in China. And we also signed VIZIO, which is a top 10 TV maker in the world. I believe they are top five or maybe even top three in USA. That's in 2001. We signed a bunch of other agreements. We actually signed 13 agreements in 2021. In 2022, we have renewed our Apple contract license. Apple is our largest customer, has been our largest customer.
The new agreement is a seven-year agreement with combined economic value of close to $1 billion. That's a B. And Apple is contracted to pay us money all the way to 2029. That's a seven-year agreement. And we also signed Amazon as a major consumer electronic IoT, because there are a lot of connected devices, Wi-Fi-enabled, some of them video-enabled. And then we are part of the licensing platform that enable connected car for 4G and going forward for 5G, okay? Overall, 80% of the cars license, connected cars, I'm talking about 4G. In 2023, which is the year behind us, hard to imagine. I always feel we are still in 2023. We get paid multiple tranches of money from Lenovo based on cellular and HEVC technology.
One is based on lawsuits, the other one is based on negotiation for video side. Okay? We also renewed our Samsung agreement near end of 2022 into 2023. Samsung was a customer for 25 years, since 1995. There's multiple traditional renewal. The last one was done near end of 2022, but we could not close the valuation, how much exact money they should pay us. We believe they should pay significant more, and that is currently being pending, decided by arbitrator. That will be decided by this summer and going to end of the year. That we believe will incur significant amount of upside compared to the prior agreement, which was signed more than 10 years ago, without 5G, without video technology, without our Apple agreement as a comparable license, which we're able to renew at significant higher valuation. Okay?
Then starting 2024, which is three weeks into it, we have announced our largest smartphone-smart TV licensing deal in our history, and that's partially into our Q1 projection number, which the company has released two days ago. Oh, on the bottom, there's a number of exist— We are not trying to list them all, but those are some of the customer we have renewed license and maintain a very good relationship with. Right, let's talk about revenue. Like I said, we have made a lot of progress, so we are showing you guys, you know, five-year trajectory here. As I said earlier, our existing devices is smartphone and CE/IoT business. The light color wide smartphone, so as you can tell, we have grown that quite a bit in the last five years. It's 15% CAGR.
On the CE/IoT business and non-smartphone business, we have grown it at even faster pace, even though it has a smaller base. So that's about 19% CAGR. And then there's other, which is a bit hard to see, it's sort of gray on the top. Historically, we have some other businesses, you know, software services and others. Frankly, in the last several years, we have decided to primarily focus on the licensing side, so that's a portion that frankly, goes on a bit over time. Okay? So let's talk about other parameters here. The left top side is the revenue growth. It's the same number I showed you guys, but with a little bit less granularity. On expense side, we have done very good job.
I mean, with COVID, with expansion, with other thing here, I think we are very disciplined in adding investment, but do it at a very good pace. So we didn't get expenses out of hand. If you look at the last five years, it's about 4%, you know, sort of roughly keep up with inflation and other things. We have upgraded the talent quite a bit in this process. On the bottom, the left-hand side is our earnings per share. That's really our business model. Our business model is very, very powerful, because once you invest in technology, you build a patent portfolio, the new license you sign, which add to the top line, but it carry practically a 100% gross margin.
So as we are growing the top line by, you know, 60%-70% in the period, our earnings per share actually more than 10x growth. Okay? And our Adjusted EBITDA margin, which, Rich in the audience, he can explain to you with all the gory details, but has grown from, you know, 40-some% to 60+% . And that's really a good indicator of the health of our company on a long-term basis. Okay. All right, this is just one chart. This is actually our pre-release for Q1 from Q4 of last year, which we believe is a very strong year.
Heading into the Q1, which is the current quarter, based on current preliminary projection, we are already having a major, you know, step-up function that's tied with, you know, the largest HEVC deal we have done so far. That's signed this quarter. But the quarter obviously is still fresh. We continue to work on new deals and, and as we do, this projection does not contain any new things, but the timing of deals, any new deals is actually hard to predict. Okay? All right, this is sort of my second to last chart. I talk about return of capital. InterDigital has a very long and exceptionally good history about returning capital to shareholders. In the last five years alone, we returned more than $800+ million.
It's in the form of, you know, in dividend, and we have a long history of doing it, and we increased the dividend before last year. We also have done significant buybacks. Buyback is frankly, you know, there's spike ups, there's frankly, IP values. Those are primarily tied with our readiness for major deal renewals, and frankly, with the success of completing major deals, we have excess cash. So that's, that's the thing. So last year was probably the year we did most of the buybacks in our history. In the beginning of the year, we announced a $400 million buyback program, and we have done $200 million in a Dutch auction, and we have done more throughout the rest of the year.
By end of the year, we have, I think, $60-some million left, and then the board announced, also right, which we announced to top it up to $300 million again. That's the current program we are running. Okay? So if you look at the shares, you know, in the last, you know, 5 years, we have reduced our share by 25%--24%. That's my last slide, which is the same, the beginning slide. So I'll just explain. I believe we have the strongest people, best inventors in our industry, led by a very experienced exec team. We have one of the largest, but most importantly, highest quality of patent portfolio in our industry.
We have done a very good job ramping up business momentum that's, frankly, built up to be a very, attractive market opportunity, and our financial performance has proven, and we hope to build momentum going forward. All right, with that, I'm open for questions. Yes. Okay, that's, that's a very good question. Let me repeat the question in case you haven't heard it. The gentleman's question was, "Hey, most of our IP license agreement are fixed fee agreement. Compare that to a alternative model, which people in our industry generally call running royalty program. How would you compare it, and what's the plus and minus for, for each program, if I may?" So number one, it's absolutely right. Most of our license agreement is fixed fee agreement, and the number is close to 90% and, you know, 80+ to 90.
So that's the bulk of our program. As a company, we are actually open for either negotiation. They have plus and minus on either side. Fixed fee just means for the course of agreement, we get paid similar amount, maybe identical amount of money, year after year through the course of agreement, regardless how much device, how many product they sell through the course. Running royalty just means every quarter, they report to us how many devices they have sold, use our technology, and we pre-negotiate either rate or percentage, and you do the multiplication. They send us a report, and we will get paid, you know, with a little bit delay in the quarter, if you would. So economically, frankly, both party can work, but in negotiation, what it represents, it represents certain amount of risk allocation.
The fixed fee basically give you the same amount of money. If the customer, the licensee, sold more than projection, they have done a good job in negotiating. Basically, on per device basis, they got a lower rate. But if they have sold less than projection, then economically we are better off because that means same amount with lower volume, we get a higher per device value. And so it's really about future, it's about projection. And my practice in our field is very often the large customers, you know, they feel they can grow their business faster or better, tend to want it a fixed fee. And smaller vendors, they may or may not want to have if they have more variability. And the other variable is the length of the contract. How long are you locking for that period of time?
We are very sufficiently, so it's our customer. In general, I think the structure works equally well or maybe slightly in our favor, because most people think they are better than average, and not everyone can beat the market. So if they believe they can do really well, for every single one that goes up in volume, there's some vendor end up losing volume. So as long as we get enough of the customers signed up, we should be equally well off either way. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, visibility, if you're referring to the auditing capability, on per customer base, maybe. But our market is so big, and frankly, we have so much room to grow.
Just for context, one thing I didn't mention is we currently, for the smartphone side, we have roughly 55% of the device total market are from our licensed customer. So there's still the rest of, you know, 30%-35% we can get. So we grew into that area. So in terms of quarter by quarter, we frankly, very safely, we subscribe to market report, market research anyways. People do the volume projection, they do different technology, different geographics. I think we are not in these spaces, we are very good. I jump to you. Yes? Okay, good. That's, that's a great question. So if you think about the way we license, there's a technology, there's use case. And if you try to build it, it's almost like a matrix, right? There's Wi-Fi technology, video technology, cellular, they all apply to smartphone.
In the meantime, Wi-Fi and video apply to TVs, right? That's sort of the theory. Specific to Samsung, Samsung is a customer for us on the smartphone side since 1995. The last agreement expired December 31, 2022, and leading into it, both parties said, "You need to renew." They agreed. You know, sign an agreement, which they also agreed. How much money we wanted more? They said they want to pay less, and we couldn't agree, we said, "Let's put into binding arbitration." That's for smartphone as a use case, which captured all technology, cellular, Wi-Fi, and video into it. That's currently pending determination. The hearing is already set for summer of 2024. We expect that to be resolved before end of the year, okay?
In the meantime, when we announced that binding arbitration, by the way, it's you know, more than a year ago, we said we intentionally carve out the TV, okay? There's two reasons. One is our TV license for some of the technology is a joint venture between us and Sony. So we don't want to drag Sony into a broader arbitration process. But equally importantly, we believe we can get a Samsung TV deal done earlier, you know, essentially resolve that issue faster, which we are able to deliver and announce like a week ago or a few days ago, right? So in that context here, that's our strategy, that's we delivered. In terms of what's needed, as I said earlier, the press announcement we said was very specific. That's a joint venture with Sony.
Some implementation pattern, also the ATSC 3.0, which is a broadcast standard pattern in there. It's also our own HEVC, VVC, which is codec pattern and our Wi-Fi pattern, you know, licensed to them only for the Samsung TV. In the meantime, if you see our announcement, we said Q1, we have a large amount of catch up payment. We could not see how much is from one particular customer because those agreements are confidential. But the largest announcement we have made is Samsung TV, so it's safe to assume a sizable portion, very significant portion of the catch up payment, you know, are related. Does that answer your question? For mobile. Okay. Mobile, there are two variable here. One is, we are not getting into the payment while the arbitration is pending, because that's part of the confidential arbitration agreement we have signed.
But one thing we can see, which is in our public release and is in our quarterly earnings, in the meantime, under the proper accounting rule, we are recognizing revenue at what we believe to be conservative of the previous agreement. I'll give you the number because it's public. The previous agreement was a 10-year agreement. Samsung is paying us $78 million per year or use our technology for smartphone, okay? We believe that's conservative. I'll give you the reason why. Because that agreement was signed 10 years ago, before we developed, you know, obviously the 4G, 5G technology, but also this before we acquired the video assets from Technicolor. From our portfolio, we believe become more valuable. That's one thing.
Second thing is, in our industry, when people are judging the value of portfolio, one of the really important factor is what people call comparable license. Basically means people who are their direct competitor, who are similarly situated, how much they paid us. We believe, I believe most people would agree, the closest competitor for Samsung is Apple. If you think about they sell high-end devices, they compete with us directly, they sell to similar market. And so Apple agreement, as we announced, the new agreement we knew we signed was $134 million, compared to $78 million. So we believe we can get more money, but in the meantime, we are recognizing revenue at $78 million since beginning of 2023.
So by the time we resolve in year 2024, if we are right, if we get higher valuation, there will be an ongoing base, but there will also be a true up compared to what we are getting, the arbitrator is deciding versus what we have been recognizing, which we believe is conservative. Does that make sense? Okay. Any other questions? Yes, sir. Yeah, that's a great question. So smartphone market is highly concentrated. There's let's say top 10 vendors worldwide, aside from Apple and Samsung, everyone else of them are China-based, right? The largest of them is Xiaomi, which we have licensed, and then there's Oppo, there's Vivo, there's Lenovo, there's TCL, and in the last quarter, there's a company called Transsion. I'll touch on Transsion a bit separately.
We have been trying to license Oppo and Vivo for a long time, and we frankly couldn't get a deal done, so we have filed the litigation against Oppo, more than two years ago now. It's November of 2021. So that case is proceeding in different jurisdiction, and we recently announced positive news in Germany, where our patent, not only our patent is found to be valid, infringed, and actually essential, but the German court has issued an injunction against them, where the German court has said we are the good guy, they are the bad guy, in terms of, you know, conducting negotiation acts properly. But Germany alone probably wouldn't. It's a worldwide litigation, we are also pursuing legal action against them in other countries, including U.K. There's a resetting case coming up in February, which is next month.
And then there's frankly a case against them in other jurisdictions, including India and Spain. So that's sort of our status. Vivo is and Oppo, for those of you who know them well, and they are somewhat connected. They are connected at the parent level called BBK. Our strategy is to license the bigger player, a stronger player first, and we are negotiating in parallel. Lenovo, we are in litigation, and we frankly got paid a significant amount of money last year in multiple tranches of cellular and HEVC, which was negotiated under the pressure of litigation. So we are in decent shape, but we are pursuing some of the older agreements ordered by the court, you know, it's run its course. So the rest, frankly, once we get those three, four vendors signed up, we are at 85%.
And the really interesting variable is if you read the report now, there's a more significant maker called Transsion, and they frankly captures a large-- ultra-low-end devices. They make devices primarily in China, they sell them to Africa. And until fairly recently, they were on very low cost, primarily 2G devices for GSM. Now they're moving up the value chain, if you would. You know, they are still lower cost devices, a lot of 4G devices being sold. So we are in the process of negotiating, but so is everyone else, by the way. You know, Qualcomm, where I used to work for, Ericsson, Nokia, we all look at Transsion as they are sort of coming up in volume. Okay. How are we doing on time? I'm trying to look at the clock. We are done? All right.
Hey, thank you very much for your time, and Brent i s here, who's head of IR. If you have any follow-up questions, I would love to catch up. Again, I appreciate your time and I appreciate your interest.