News broke yesterday that Huawei, the world’s largest maker of 4G LTE network equipment, was suing Samsung on patent grounds.
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The lawsuit marks a turnaround for Chinese phone makers like Huawei who have been maligned over the last few years for allegedly stealing patented technologies.
Samsung replied that they will make a full assessment of the lawsuit to defend its business interests.
Samsung took the lead in smartphone sales, capturing 24.5% of the global market, which is followed by Apple and then Huawei with a whopping 8.2% of the smartphone market share. They used to be the number one smartphone in China, but now they are down to 6, behind Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Apple and Xiaomi.
Huawei filed the suits concurrently in the Northern District of California and the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court.
Huawei claims that the company offered a fair charge to Samsung for using its patents but the Korean company refused to pay.
The specific patents involved have not been disclosed.
As of December 31, 2015, Huawei had been granted more than 50,000 patents around the world, and previous year agreed a cross-licence arrangement with Ericsson for standard essential patents for wireless communications.
“We hope Samsung will respect Huawei’s R&D investment and patents, stop infringing our patents and get the necessary licence from Huawei, and work together with Huawei to jointly drive the industry forward”. Samsung, also the world’s No. 1 memory chip and tv maker, stated in a May 16 filing it held 110,145 patents worldwide at end-2015 and invested 14.8 trillion won ($ 12.45 billion) in research and development in addition to intellectual property past year.
This comes five years after Apple waged a 38-page federal complaint against Samsung for infringing upon patents and trademarks relating primarily to an updated iPhone user interface and product design.
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By the end of past year, Huawei had 50,377 authorized patents and had applied for 52,550 in China and 30,613 overseas, according the company’s annual report.
