At 8:00 a.m., in the morning traffic rush of Shanghai, tens of millions of people are crowding into the city. Ke Xiaopeng, director of IP department of a foreign company's Greater China branch, still chooses to walk. Along the beautiful Suzhou River, he walks for half an hour before arriving at his company. The walk has become a rare leisure for him.
This state of life is related to his work. At the age of 35, Ke Xiaopeng is still young. However, his cause has remained steady. He entered Foxconn's IP department in 2000, where he started working as a patent engineer. Then, after serving as ZTE's professional IP manager for eight years, he became Director of IP Department under NXP Semiconductors (Greater China) and takes charge of its IP business throughout the Asia Pacific region. In many people's eyes, Ke Xiaopeng has climbed to the peak of his career as a native Chinese IP manager.
Ke Xiaopeng has gone through 14 -year growing from a nobody in IP industry to an industrial leader. Although 14 years is probably not long enough for an IP practitioner in Europe, in China the transformation and opportunities that happened 14 years ago marked the beginning of the cultivation of China’s first batch of IP professionals. All of these changes remind people of a single company -- Foxconn.
Foxconn: I was given this opportunity at the perfect timing.
Back in the year of 2000, Terry Gou was not the richest man in Taiwan. A U.S. patent litigation forced Foxconn to close one of their production lines. In this year, Foxconn reformed its IP strategy due to the losses in the patent infringement case. It started to recruit talents from Mainland China, including more than 200 new employees recruited into the IP department in Shenzhen and Kunshan. These college graduates, who had academic backgrounds in engineering but no experience in IP, opened the prelude to the golden age of IP management in Foxconn.
In 2000, Ke Xiaopeng was 21 years old. Approaching graduation, most of his classmates had found jobs, but he was still patiently waiting. Though he majored in engineering, Ke Xiaopeng has quite a bit talent in literary fields. He was not willing to do R&D in a research institute. He did not want a purely text-based job either. In a campus job fair, he saw the words “Intellectual Property” by chance and intuitively felt that it would be the ideal work for him. “After talking with the HR staff, I found that IP was indeed a combination of text and art work, which was in line with my personal interests,” Ke Xiaopeng said, “A woman fears marrying the wrong husband, while a man is afraid of starting the wrong career. It is extremely important for a man to choose a suitable industry and make long-term persistence and accumulation, thereby obtaining valuable experiences and continuous improvement.”
After entering Foxconn, Ke Xiaopeng felt that the company made a massive investment in IP. At that time, Foxconn had an IP team with hundreds of engineers and millions in capital investments. While the majority of domestic enterprises knew little about IP management, Foxconn reached an advanced international level. Its IP system contained both centralized management and vertical management. The division of labor was extremely detailed. For example, some personnel took charge of writing patents for U.S. applications while some were responsible for patent searches and infringement analysis. In order to train these zero-experience staff, Foxconn transferred a group of senior IP managers from the IP department in the U.S. and Taiwan regions. The new staff were trained and guided in writing American and Chinese applications, analysis report, etc. It was this inner training and resource sharing that became an unforgettable “Foxconn complex” for these new staff.
As a patent engineer, Ke Xiaopeng performed mainly two kinds of work: patent applications and patent analysis. Before patent applications, he would do the digging work, for example he needed to communicate regularly with R&D staff of various departments to determine whether their projects contain possible technologies worthy of applying. Thus, he had to read a lot of patent gazettes and fully comprehend the latest technologies for connectors and antennas in the field of communication devices. However, the patent search tools of Foxconn were still very primitive. Once for an important project, Ke Xiaopeng and his colleagues had to travel from Kunshan to Shanghai in early morning by train. In the Shanghai Library, they spent two days to read patent publications and photocopy the relevant contents one by one.
The public usually has the impression that Foxconn is an “OEM factory.” The fact is Foxconn also undertakes ODM. Some computer or mobile phone manufacturers make orders and product requirements, while Foxconn takes charge of the full process from product design to production. Ke Xiaopeng told the reporter of China IP, the market competition is very fierce for Foxconn because the technical threshold is not high. In the design process, careful comparison and analysis should be conducted before making the conclusion on whether the technology infringes others’ rights. After losing a lawsuit, Foxconn became very strict in infringement analysis. New projects must go through infringement analysis and the conclusion would be signed by the chief of the respective department after several steps to double check.
Ke Xiaopeng got involved in his first patent design by chance. It was a built-in rechargeable connector for Nokia cellphone. After accepting the order from Nokia, Foxconn found that its competitor had invented a similar connector and applied for a patent in a very short period of time. Therefore, Foxconn had to meet the customer requirements without infringing other’s rights. By virtue of their technical background, Ke Xiaopeng and his colleagues made a bold proposal and added two slots on the cover of the charging connector. This simple design not only applied for a new patent, but also saved materials, becoming a typical case for evasive designing. Ke Xiaopeng said, “To make an effective layout in a patentintensive technological field, we have to gain a profound understanding and accumulation of the existing patents, and to control the technology itself.”
At that time, Ke Xiaopeng was simply a “technical freak.” He admitted that he could know about almost every patent in his own technical field. In the autumn of 2001, Ke Xiaopeng came to Tai'an with 20-plus colleagues. In a school at the foot of Mount Tai, they participated in the Patent Agent Qualification Examination with nearly 200 candidates from six provinces and one municipality in East China. The exam was so unpopular that learning materials were very scarce, not to mention training courses. Fortunately, many colleagues prepared for the exam together with Ke Xiaopeng. “For several months before the exam, we often discussed the questions and cases and shared learning experiences. This preparation process was very memorable,” Ke Xiaopeng recalled. In March of 2002, the results were published and Ke Xiaopeng received the patent agent qualification as expected. He felt even more confident about his future career development.
The work intensity at Foxconn was very high. Workers on the production line worked in three shifts and the office work was also not easy. Patent engineers had to spend all their time writing patent documents and thus the deskwork seemed increasingly boring and unbearable. Coupled with the low profile of the industry, some colleagues could not persist. Many of the newcomers who were recruited together with Ke Xiaopeng decided to drop out during the trial period.
From Ke Xiaopeng’s view, writing patents is a considerably challenging job, so that the freshness could maintain for a few years. “I did not think that Foxconn was a sweatshop. It is probably related to my personality. I like challenges and can bear hardship,” Ke Xiaopeng said.
“Looking back at the era of youth, I think it was not a bad thing to enter a relatively harsh environment upon graduation. Corporate culture, professionalism and expertise are the three most valuable elements for a lifetime career. Foxconn gave me a good starting point. Although I left the company more than a decade ago, I am still very grateful to Foxconn. for it gave me an opportunity to carve out my career at the exact moment of my life,” Ke Xiaopeng said.
Metamorphosis to a senior manager
In 2003, Chinese technology companies began to make significant inroads into the international market. Domestic telecommunication device manufacturers such as Huawei and ZTE also began to encounter IP pressures from international competitors in Europe and the U.S. Since then, patent disputes between Huawei, ZTE and foreign companies frequently have been reported by newspapers. At the same time, more and more Chinese enterprises began to increase investment in IP. Since 2004, the IP input by ZTE and Huawei gradually caught up with and even surpassed Foxconn.
While the domestic demand for IP talents kept surging, Ke Xiaopeng, who had worked for Foxconn for nearly three years, was also considering his own future development. Due to the detailed division of labor, he began to feel a bottleneck for his career development. In April 2003, Ke Xiaopeng left Foxconn and walked into the gate of ZTE headquarters in Shenzhen with high hopes and ambitions.
Even Ke Xiaopeng himself had not thought about working at ZTE for more than eight years. IP work at ZTE developed rapidly in these years. Beginning with simple patent application, ZTE’s IP work developed into a multi-level businesses. Ke Xiaopeng, who had started single handedly, had led a professional team of more than 40 people after eight years. Ke Xiaopeng did not talk much about his efforts in these years. To summarize his work at ZTE, Ke Xiaopeng said it was an important process for him to develop from a novice into a senior IP manager.
In 2011, ZTE ranked first place in patent applications in the world. The whole company was inspired by this achievement, but Ke Xiaopeng chose to leave ZTE. At that time, Ke served as the IP Director of ZTE’s wireline business, becoming one of the leading figures of the IP team. He supervised and planned a number of major events in the IP field. One of his former subordinates told China IP that Ke is a great leader and a scholarly man. His team is always clear in labor division and orderly in execution.
However, it seemed to Ke Xiaopeng that his career encountered another bottleneck. He needed a more international platform and a more open city to make new breakthrough in his career. By the end of 2011, Ke Xiaopeng chose a foreign company that was not so f amous--NXP Semiconductors, and soon became IP director for the Greater China branch.
NXP Semiconductors, incorporated in 2006, was listed on NASDAQ in 2010. It seemed like a newly--founded company, but it was actually set up by Philips over 50 years ago. The majority of the company’s IP staff came from Philips. “I have 11 years of working experience as an IP practitioner, but I am definitely not the most experienced one at NXP. Many of my colleagues have decades of experience, from whom I have learned a lot, including international business operations, IP professional skills, etc.,” Ke Xiaopeng said.
Become a better me
In the past 14 years, Ke Xiaopeng has experienced through the company cultures of a Taiwan enterprise, private company in Mainland China and foreign-invested company. He also went up from the downstream of the industry chain to the upstream. From his perspective, this experience is a valuable asset: it not only enlarges his vision, but also deepens his understanding of the operation of different industries. “Taiwan enterprises, private enterprises and foreign enterprises are three very different types of corporations. They can help me better understand and accommodate to partners and even competitors from different backgrounds. It is essential for a professional IP manager,” Ke Xiaopeng said.
When mentioning a possible future stage, Ke Xiaopeng said that the development space in private companies may be greater judging from the perspective of responsibilities and participation in strategic decision-making. ke posted a blurry photo about gathering with his former colleagues in FOXCONN on his social network, from which we could still recognize the young faces of Ke and his colleagues. Some of them have become senior IP managers and some have become partners of well-known law firms. On that day, Ke Xiaopeng wrote some sentimental words: The cups are filled to celebrate brothers getting back together. We just finished a small half of the marathon of life. I wish we all become a “better me.”
（Translated by Li Yu）
