ZTE Corporation, founded in Shenzhen (China) in 1985, is a leading provider of telecommunications products and services and offers its solutions to more than 500 Operators in 160 countries worldwide. The company, listed on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges, boasts innovative solutions tailored to each customer’s specific needs, develops mobile devices and business enterprise solutions, and is at the forefront of 4G and 5G. ZTE invests more than 10% of its annual turnover in research and development, making it one of the top four international companies actively involved in defining new telecommunications standards. The group has 19 state-of-the-art R&D centres globally, and employs more than 30,000 professionals in the development of next-generation technologies including 5G, IoT, NFV, SDN, Cloud Computing and Big Data. In 2017, for the seventh consecutive year, ZTE is listed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) as one of the top 3 companies in the world for patents with more than 33,000 approved applications, including more than 2,000 related to 5G to date, an area in which it is the absolute leader.