日前,世界知名知识产权服务提供商思保环球(CPA Global)对2019年1月31日之前在ETSI上所声明的5G标准必要专利和5G标准相关专利申请数量进行了统计,并从申报时间、持有企业、分布区域、以及已授权5G标准必要专利数量;同时还对,各企业声明的5G标准必要专利属于5G新技术还是3G/4G继承技术做了统计分析。
报告内容如下:
Authors
Subodh Thali
Vice President, IP (Search & Analytics), CPA Global
Xiaofei Shao
Senior Consultant, IP (Search & Analytics), CPA Global
Source:CPA Global
Synopsis
Key global players in mobile telecommunication sector are currently focused on maximizing their contributions to 5G via declaration of their patented technologies to various technical aspects of 5G. There are multiple parameters which can be used to provide an indication of a given company’s contribution to the standard. Exemplary parameters which can be used to evaluate the declared patent data include the number of declarations, number of standard essential patents (identified by mapping each declared patent with standard specifications by technical expert), geographic filing activity, implementation analysis, distribution of declared patents across 3GPP TSGs (RAN, SA, CT), filing timelines, recent filing activity and overlap of 5G declared patents with 3G/ 4G declarations. In light of this, CPA Global’s team of telecommunication experts has conducted an analysis on patent declarations to a set of selected key ETSI projects pertaining to 5G. CPA Global’s analysis consists of three major sections, based on the parameters described above:
• Major companies’ declaration activity – based on declaration patent data
• Overview of patented technologies declared to 5G – based on family information of declared patent data
• Standard essentiality analysis of granted patent declarations – based on technical review of declared granted patent families by CPA Global’s experts. This analysis consisted of a technical mapping of each declared patent’s claims to over 100 5G technical specifications from Release 15
Each separate analysis in the content below is based on diverse parameters (highlighted in each section). Each parameter provides a unique perspective, and the analysis based on multiple perspectives, in combination, provides a useful indication about top contributors to the 5G standard.
Introduction
5G (namely, "5th Generation") is the new generation of mobile communications, which succeeds the 4G LTE/LTE-A/LTE-A Pro. The 5G performance targets high data rate, reduced latency, energy saving, cost reduction, higher system capacity, and massive device connectivity. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has defined three main types of usage scenario for 5G – (i) Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), (ii) Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), and (iii) massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC)/Massive Internet of Things (MIoT).
Release 15, the primary focus of which is support for the eMBB scenario, was mainly frozen at the June 2018 RAN plenary meeting and most 5G players have been focused on declaring their 5G standard related patents to European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). CPA Global has retrieved this declared patent information and conducted an analysis on the declared patent information since patent declarations are good indicators of R&D focus, engagement and contribution of various entities to the standard. The study, especially, the substantive technical review of the declared patents, provides a reliable approach for evaluating contributions to the 5G standardization activity.
CPA Global’s Methodology and Team
As mentioned above, the study includes the following three parts: (1) major companies’ declaration activity, (2) overview of patented technologies declared to 5G based on family information of declared patent data, and (3) standard essentiality analysis of granted patent declarations.
Part 1 and part 2 are based on statistical analysis of declared patent data retrieved from ETSI without any technical review being performed on the data. Moreover, part 1 is majorly based on standard declared patent data (with each declared patent application considered individually, totally, ~40,000 declarations) whereas part 2 analyses the data from a patent family perspective (by grouping the published declarations, totally, ~9,400 patent families). A patent family, as defined by EPO, can be broadly defined as a collection of patent applications which are related and cover the same or similar content in different jurisdictions. As such, both perspectives become important with the analysis on individual declarations (part 1) representing the overall declaration activity and the family based analysis (part 2) representing the innovation activity within the declared data.
Part 3 is based on a substantive technical review of families with granted patents (totally, ~3,900 patent families) within the declared patent dataset. The analysis has been focused on granted patents since the claims of these applications are presumed to be valid over prior art (allowed after prosecution of the patent application by the patent examiner) and have minimal possibility of being amended in the future. Pending patent publications, on the other hand, have a greater likelihood of their claims being amended during their prosecution (or not even being granted) and therefore, technical review of such pending publications’ claims has not been performed. The technical review in part 3 was based on analysis of one representative granted patent per patent family. The representative member for each family was taken as the latest granted patent which has been declared.
The scope of the technical review included mapping of the broadest independent claim of each representative granted patent to more than 100 Release 15 technical specifications that are related to 5G, which resulted in 644 granted patent families being identified as “core”. Moreover, part 3 also includes implementation analysis which consisted of identifying whether the claims of each representative core granted patent are implementable on one or more of (i) terminal (UE), (ii) Base Station (BS) and (iii) core network.
The technical review which forms the basis of part 3 in this article, has been conducted by CPA Global’s worldwide pool of telecommunication experts. These experts hold Master’s or Bachelor’s degrees in telecommunications and are equipped with experience in 3GPP standard mapping projects. Our pool of experts also includes patent agents and certified experts on 3GPP technologies. Further, technical review of Chinese patent data has been conducted by telecommunication experts from CPA Global’s China team.
Part I: Major Companies’ Declaration Activity
Article 3 of the ETSI Intellectual Property Right (IPR) Policy indicates, amongst other things, that the ETSI IPR policy seeks a balance between the needs of standardization for public use in the field of telecommunications and the rights of the owners of IPRs.
The ETSI IPR Policy maintains this balance by requiring every ETSI member to use reasonable endeavours to inform ETSI of essential IPRs in a timely fashion. Once an essential IPR is identified, the IPR owner is asked to make an irrevocable undertaking in writing that it is prepared to grant irrevocable licences on Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms and conditions under the IPR. In order to facilitate the process of notification of Standards Essential Patents (SEPs), members can use General Declarations by which they make an irrevocable undertaking that they are prepared to grant licenses under FRAND terms and conditions for all their SEPs within a given standardization area. Therefore, members have obligation to at least declare their SEPs on ETSI. Patent data declarations on ETSI consist of granted patents, published applications and un-published applications; hereafter referred to as Standard Declared Patents (SDPs).
CPA Global has conducted its analysis by retrieving Standard Declared Patents (SDPs) declared to a set of key ETSI projects on or before January 31st, 2019. These ETSI projects were selected because of their relevance to 5G standard. For projects having overlap with previous generation technologies, CPA Global further focused on the most relevant data pertaining to 5G by using a set of more than 100 Release 15 technical specifications to filter the 5G SDPs.
Declaration overview
A timeline of the patent declaration data has been shown above, which indicates that maximum declarations were submitted in 2018. The 5G SDP statistics in the quarter 1 of 2019 includes the patent declaration data on or before January 31st, 2019, which may not be complete.
The below charts illustrate the quantity of 5G SDPs for top 15 declaring companies, where the SDPs include declared granted patents/ pending applications which have been declared to the set of selected ETSI projects on or before January 31st, 2019. The declared patents have also been grouped into families.
Based on individual declarations, Korean, US, Chinese and European companies are major participants in the constitution of the 5G standard. Among Korean companies, Samsung is the leading company based on the quantity of SDPs and followed by LG. Samsung’s volume of SDPs is more than 3 times that of LG. There are several major participants from the United States, and Qualcomm has an obvious lead in the SDP filings, followed by Intel and Interdigital. Qualcomm’s volume of SDPs is more than 10 times that of the second biggest US player, that is, Intel. Among Chinese companies, Huawei is the top SDP filer, followed by ZTE and China Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT). Huawei’s SDP portfolio is around 4 times that of ZTE. Ericsson and Nokia are two major participants from Europe with SDP count of Ericsson being more than 3 times that of Nokia. Therefore, based on the quantity of SDPs and comparison with other companies from the same jurisdiction, Samsung, Qualcomm, Huawei and Ericsson form the first tier in the major participants from both global and regional perspective.
When viewed in terms of number of declared families, Chinese players Huawei and ZTE, along with Samsung have the highest contributions to the declared patent data. More detailed analysis on family based data has been presented in the next section.
Geographic activity
The above chart illustrates the geographic distribution of the SDPs for the top 15 companies and provides some interesting insights:
• A majority of the SDPs are from US, followed by WIPO patent applications and Chinese and EP patent applications;
• The first tier companies have a global coverage of patent portfolio, where their portfolio in the major jurisdictions (US, CN, EP, JP and KR) is stronger than other jurisdictions;
• Samsung has a larger declared portfolio in US than other major jurisdictions including Korea;
• Qualcomm has a much stronger portfolio of SDPs in Chinese Taipei as compared to other companies. This may be related to Qualcomm’s focused efforts in Chinese Taipei, particularly, their collaboration with the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the region;
• Samsung’s count of SDPs in China is comparable to its count of SDPs in Korea;
• Compared to other companies, Huawei has the highest number of declared PCT applications;
Overlap with 3G/4G standard declared patents
The above chart illustrates the overlap of the retrieved 5G SDPs with 4G SDPs and 3G SDPs.
Among the first tier companies, Huawei has the highest volume of such patents declared only to 5G, followed by Qualcomm and Sharp. In fact, 80% of Huawei’s retrieved 5G SDP portfolio has not been declared to 3G or 4G. Among other leading companies, Sharp, ZTE, Intel and CATT have a majority of their 5G SDPs only declared to the 5G standard. In fact, more than 97% of ZTE’s and Intel’s 5G SDPs are declared only to the 5G standard. Similarly, more than 90% of CATT’s 5G SDP portfolio also has not been declared to 3G or 4G.
On the other hand, 90% of Samsung’s retrieved 5G SDP portfolio has also been declared to 3G or 4G standards. Similarly, 70% of Ericsson’s retrieved 5G SDP portfolio has also been declared to 3G or 4G standards.
On the other hand, around half of LG’s and Nokia’s 5G SDPs have been declared to either 3G or 4G standards.
Part II: Overview of Patented Technologies Declared to 5G
Using bibliographic information from Innography and other sources, the retrieved SDPs comprising of published patent applications (granted and pending) have been collated into 9,423 patent families, where each patent family includes at least one published SDP (granted or pending) declared on or before January 31st, 2019. The collated family data has been used to identify further insights. The study of the patent families from multiple aspects, such as timeline, geographic activity and major companies’ activity has been presented below.
Note that the analysis in this section is based on published data only and the non-published declarations have not been included in this analysis. The counts indicated in this section are therefore bound to increase as declared applications get published over course of time.
Timeline
The above chart illustrates the earliest priority timeline of all patent families which include at least one published 5G SDP. Earliest priority date of a patent application correlates with its innovation time frame; and therefore, earliest priority trends in a patent dataset can be used to get indicative insights on innovation activity.
A quarter of the patent families have an earliest priority before 2010 – this portion of the 5G SDP families has a high probability of including legacy technologies from previous generations such as 3G or 4G. In contrast, the patent families having earliest priority in and after 2016 are more likely to be specifically related to 5G.
Further, as observed, there is a steep increase in innovation activity from 2013 to 2016, which reaches a crest of 2,196 patent families having earliest priority in 2016. This also correlates to the official start of the 3GPP 5G standardization activity in 2016. Because of delay in publication, the data of 2017 and 2018 may not be complete.
Geographic activity
The above chart illustrates the geographic distribution of the 9,423 patent families, based on the earliest priority jurisdiction of these patent families. Based on the earliest priority jurisdiction analysis of the 5G SDP data, China and US are the two major locations for innovation on 5G. Particularly, in the last 5 years, China has steamed further ahead of the US on 5G standard declarations. Further, for the last 5 years, the contribution from Europe has been relatively lesser.
Although Korean companies are active in the 5G standardization activity as mentioned before, not all of their 5G SDP filings have originated in Korea. A good proportion of Samsung and LG SDPs have originated from US. This also aligns with the previous observations that Samsung and LG have more US patent data than KR patents. In addition, PCT route has been frequently adopted for 5G SDP filings in the last 5 years.
The above chart illustrates the timeline of the earliest priorities for the top 10 jurisdictions. As observed, there is an obvious increase in the number of patent families originating in China from 2014 to 2016, which reaches a peak of 860 patent families in 2016. This indicates that many new 5G standard related inventions originated from China during this time period. Furthermore, the 5G standard related R&D in Chinese Taipei becomes more active from 2015. The PCT route experienced a big spike in 2015 and 2016. In fact, around 35% of the patent families with priority in 2015 and 2016 adopt the PCT route. Particularly, 964 patent families used the PCT route in 2016; with Huawei, Intel and Ericsson being the key contributors to this count.
Major companies’ activity
The above chart illustrates the overview of patent families including at least one published SDP for the top 15 entities. As on January 31st, 2019, Huawei has the highest number of patent families consisting of at least one published SDP and is followed by Samsung.
A majority of the top 15 players can be divided into three sets based on the proportion of recent filings in the declared patent families. Huawei, ZTE, CATT, Intel and KT Corp form one set of players which have a majority of their 5G SDP families filed in the last 5 years with a majority of the SDPs currently pending. The portfolios of these players may have a higher possibility of being related to new technologies pertaining specifically to 5G.
On the other hand, Samsung, LG and Fujitsu form a second set of players with lesser proportion of 5G SDP families filed in the last 5 years and with a higher proportion of SDP patents being granted. The portfolios of these players have a higher possibility of being focused on legacy technologies compatible to 5G.
Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Sharp, Interdigital, ETRI and ITRI form a third set of players with a balanced proportion of filings before and after 2014.
The above chart illustrates the timeline of patent families for the top 15 entities based on the earliest priority year data. The quantity of patent families with priority in and after 2016 are also presented, since these are more likely to be related to new technologies specifically pertaining to 5G. The 5G SDP portfolio of Huawei has an even proportion of priority filings before and after 2016. Moreover, Huawei has the highest number of patent families filed from 2016 onwards and is followed by ZTE. ZTE, CATT and Intel have more patent families filed from 2016 onwards than those filed before 2016. On the contrary, Samsung, Qualcomm, Ericsson, LG, Nokia and Sharp have more patent families filed before 2016.
Part III: Standard Essentiality Analysis of Granted Patent Declarations
From the 9,423 retrieved patent families, 3,929 patent families have at least one granted patent, which was issued on or before January 31st, 2019. CPA Global has conducted the standard essentiality analysis based on analysis of one declared granted patent per patent family. Specifically, key features in the broadest independent claim of the representative granted patent in each family have been compared to more than 100 Release 15 technical specifications that are related to 5G. A majority of these technical specifications are related to working groups from Radio Access Network (RAN) TSG of 3GPP.
In this analysis, a patent was marked as ‘core’ if a significant overlap was identified between the scope of the patent’s independent claims and the content of one or more of the Release 15 specifications. On the other hand, the patent was marked as ‘non-core’ if the patented technology was merely related to one or more technical concepts from the specifications but had a lesser likelihood of being implemented in the standard.
Based on this analysis, 644 core granted patents (families) were identified. The deep-dive analysis of the core granted patent families from multiple aspects, such as geographic activity, technology implementation overview, major companies’ activity and overlap with the 3G/4G standard declared patents are presented below.
Geographic activity
The above charts illustrate the geographic distribution of the core granted patent families, which is based on their earliest priority data. Around 36% of the core granted patent families originated from US and another ~20% each from China and Europe. Note that the identified core granted dataset does not contain any patent with priority in 2017 or 2018 and therefore, data with priority from 2012 onwards has been depicted in this analysis.
Technology implementation overview
Our analysis of the 644 core granted patent families also included a review of their independent claims from an implementation perspective – that is, whether the claims were implementable on one or more of (i) terminal (UE), (ii) Base Station (BS) and (iii) core network. The claims of a patent can be applicable to more than one categories. As such, if one claim of a patent is relevant to Terminal (UE) and another claim of the same patent is relevant to Base Station (BS), the patent has been marked as being relevant to both UE and BS.
The above chart illustrates the implementation analysis for the core granted patent families. Around 80% of the core granted patent families include claims that can be implemented on a terminal (UE). Around 60% of the core granted patent families include claims that can be implemented on a BS. Only around 14% of the core granted patent families include claims that can be implemented on the core network.
The above chart illustrates the distribution of the core granted patent families across the three 3GPP Technical Specification Groups (TSGs): Radio Access Network (RAN), Service & systems Aspects (SA) and Core network & Terminals (CT). As observed, more than 85% of the core granted patent families are pertaining to RAN, which is over 8 times the number of core granted patent families pertaining to SA and 22 times the number of core granted patent families pertaining to CT. Again, the reason for the high proportion of RAN in the above chart is also the fact that a majority of the technical specifications used in this analysis were pertaining to TSG RAN. A further analysis on the major Work Groups (WGs) for each TSG is presented below.
The above chart illustrates the distribution of the core granted patent families across major technical specifications of RAN: RAN1 (Physical layer) and RAN2 (Radio interface layers). For this analysis, we have selected the major technical specifications which have been mapped to 10 or more core granted patent families. For RAN1, TS 38.213 and TS 38.214 are the two most frequently mapped technical specifications, which are related to the physical layer procedures for control and data, respectively. These are followed by TS 38.211 and TS 38.212, which pertain to physical channels & modulation, and multiplexing & channel coding, respectively.
For RAN2, TS 38.300, TS 38.321 and TS 38.331 are the three frequently most mapped technical specifications, which pertain to the the overall architecture of NG-RAN, the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol, respectively. TS 37.340 is another major technical specification for RAN2, which pertains to multi-connectivity and overall description.
The above chart illustrates the distribution of the core granted patent families across major technical specifications of SA: SA2 (Architecture) and SA3 (Security). There are only three technical specifications from TSG SA having more than 10 mapped core granted patent families. For SA2, TS 23.501 and TS 23.502 are the most frequently mapped technical specifications, which pertain to the system architecture and procedures for the 5G system, respectively. For SA3, TS 33.501 is the most frequently mapped technical specification, which is about the security architecture and procedures for 5G System.
The above chart illustrates the distribution of core granted patent families across major technical specifications of CT: CT1 (User Equipment - Core network layer 3 radio protocols) and CT3 (Interworking with external networks & Policy and charging control, end-to-end QoS mechanisms). For CT1, there is only one technical specification having 10 or more mapped core granted patent families; namely, TS 24.501, which pertains to Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) protocol for 5G System (5GS). For CT3, there is no technical specification having more than 10 mapped core granted patent families.
Major companies’ activity
The above chart illustrates the overview of the core granted patent families for the top 12 companies.
The top 7 companies account for around 96% of the total quantity of the core granted patent families. Huawei has the highest number of core granted patent families and is followed by Samsung and LG. Among the top 7 companies, Huawei also leads in terms of the proportion of core granted families from within its overall set of declared families and is followed by LG. Moreover, Huawei and Sharp have relatively recent core granted patent families, as compared to other players such as LG, Qualcomm and Nokia.
The above chart illustrates the timeline of the core granted patent families for the top 12 companies. The timeline is based on the earliest priority years of the core granted patent families. As mentioned before, the core granted patent families having the earliest priority before 2010 have a higher likelihood of being legacy technologies carried forward from previous generations of technologies. Further, the data within the time frame from 2010 to 2015 may contain some proportion of legacy technologies as this time period marks the transition from 4G to 5G development. Finally, the core granted patent families having earliest priority in or after 2016 are likely to be specific to 5G.
The above chart illustrates the company-wise distribution of the core granted patent families based on the implementation subjects – that is, terminal (UE), Base Station (BS) and core network. Overall, for the top 6 companies’ core granted patents, terminal (UE) is the most focused implementation subject. Nokia and Huawei have the highest proportions of technologies from within their respective core granted patent families which are implementable on core network. On the other hand, LG, Sharp and Ericsson have minimum number of core granted patent families with claims implementable on core network. For the implementation on BS, Huawei, Samsung, Qualcomm and LG are the top 4 players.
The above chart illustrates the distribution of company-wise core granted patent families across the three 3GPP Technical Specification Groups (TSGs): Radio Access Network (RAN), Service & systems Aspects (SA) and Core network & Terminals (CT). Huawei has the highest number of core granted patent families related to TSG RAN and is followed by Samsung and LG. Huawei also leads based on the number of core granted patent families related to TSG SA and TSG CT.
The above chart illustrates the company-wise distribution of core granted patent families for major technical specifications of RAN: RAN1 (Physical layer) and RAN2 (Radio interface layers) which have been mapped to 10 or more granted patent families.
For RAN1, Huawei leads the number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.211, TS 38.213 and TS 38.214, which are related to physical channels and modulation; physical layer procedures for control and physical layer procedures for data, respectively. Samsung has the highest number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.212, which discusses multiplexing and channel coding. LG and Sharp have a higher number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.213 than to other RAN1 technical specifications. Similarly, Qualcomm has a higher number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.214 than to other RAN1 technical specifications.
For RAN2, Qualcomm leads on the number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.300, which discusses the overview and overall description of the NG-RAN. LG leads on the number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.321, which is related to Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. Moreover, Huawei has the highest number of core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.331, which discusses Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol. Samsung has more core granted patent families mapped to TS 38.321 and TS 38.331 than to other RAN2 technical specifications. In addition, all of the top 6 companies have minimal presence in TS 37.340, which is related to NR and multi-connectivity.
Similar analysis has been provided below to illustrate company-wise distribution of core granted patent families for major technical specifications of TSG SA and TSG CT respectively. However, as mentioned before, the majority of the technical specifications used in this analysis were pertaining to TSG RAN and this is a key reason for the lower numbers in the below analysis.
The above chart illustrates the company-wise distribution of the core granted patent families for some major technical specifications of SA: SA2 (Architecture) and SA3 (Security). For TSG SA, there are only three technical specifications having more than 10 mapped core granted patent families. For SA2, Huawei leads the number of the core granted patent families mapped to TS 23.501 and TS 23.502, which are related to the system architecture and procedures for the 5G system, respectively. For SA3, Huawei again leads on the number of the core granted patent families.
The above chart illustrates the company-wise distribution of the core granted patent families for some major technical specifications of CT: CT1 (User Equipment - Core network layer 3 radio protocols) and CT3 (Interworking with external networks & Policy and charging control, end-to-end QoS mechanisms). For CT1, TS 24.501 is the only technical specification having more than 10 mapped core granted patent families.
Overlap with the 3G/4G standard declared patents
The above chart illustrates the overlap of the core granted patent families with 3G and 4G declarations. Huawei, LG, Sharp and Qualcomm are the key players having a minimal overlap of their 5G core SDP portfolio with their declarations to 3G or 4G. Particularly, Huawei has the highest number of granted patent families which have been identified as core to 5G but have not been declared to the 3G or 4G standard. In terms of percentages, 75% of Sharp’s 5G core granted patent families do not have any overlap with their declarations to 3G or 4G. Sharp is followed by Huawei (50%), LG (40%) and Qualcomm (40%) in this regard. On the other hand, Ericsson and Samsung have a high proportion of their 5G core granted patent families, also declared to 3G or 4G – that is, 93% for Ericsson and 98% for Samsung.
Conclusions
CPA Global’s review of the 5G declared patent data (from the set of selected ETSI projects) has included analysis from multiple perspectives - the number of declarations, number of standard essential patents (identified via mapping the declared granted patents with the standard specifications by technical expert), geographic filing activity, implementation analysis, distribution of declared patents across 3GPP TSGs (RAN, SA, CT), filing timelines, recent filing activity and overlap of 5G declared patents with 3G/ 4G declarations. This overall analysis has been conducted using a combination of raw data retrieved from ETSI, bibliographic information for the raw declaration data retrieved from Innography and a technical review of the granted patents from the declaration data by CPA Global’s technical experts. Based on this overall analysis, Huawei, Samsung, LG, Qualcomm and Ericsson (in no particular order) seem to be the key contributors to 5G standard development and account for a significant portion of the IP relevant to the implementation of the standard.
Disclaimer:
This article is prepared based on objective assessment of search results conducted by CPA Global in accordance with the parameters, scope and methodology set out above. CPA Global is not a law firm, and this article does not constitute legal advice, nor does it create any attorney-client relationship. CPA Global hereby expressly disclaim any liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any information set out in this article. Any decisions or actions by any party based in any way whatsoever on the contents of this article shall be the sole responsibility of that party; CPA Global shall not be responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of information in this article.
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