Chinese telecom equipment vendor ZTE has reportedly filed a lawsuit against domestic rival Huawei Technologies for alleged LTE patent violations.
This came just a day after Huawei, the largest vendor in China, sued ZTE in France, Germany, and Hungary for…
Chinese telecom equipment vendor ZTE has reportedly filed a lawsuit against domestic rival Huawei Technologies for alleged LTE patent violations.
This came just a day after Huawei, the largest vendor in China, sued ZTE in France, Germany, and Hungary for alleged patent and trademark infringement on some of its products.
“The lawsuits were filed on the basis that ZTE is infringing a series of Huawei’s patents relating to data card and LTE (Long Term Evolution) technologies and illegally used a Huawei-registered trademark on some of its data card products,” read a Huawei statement at the end of April.
It has been argued that Huawei is looking to limit the growth of ZTE, currently number two in the country. “ZTE has been looking to replicate the success of both Huawei and Ericsson, which is a concern for the two companies,” Huang Leping, an analyst with Nomura International, told TelecomFinance.
The last few months have seen several vendors suing each others in an attempt to protect their intellectual property rights. A recent example is that of Swedish mobile company Ericsson and ZTE, which filed lawsuits against each other in several countries in April.
In the meantime, Huawei and Motorola Solutions said in April that they had come to an agreement to settle all pending legal action between them over the acquisition of Motorola’s networks business by the European vendor Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN).
Huawei, which had worked with Motorola for ten years prior to the deal, was concerned that the deal would involve Motorola transferring confidential Huawei intellectual property to NSN.
Before that, in March, Finnish vendor Nokia filed a second complaint against Apple for allegedly infringing Nokia’s patents in its mobile phones, tablets, portable music players and computers.
ZTE could not be reached for comment before the press deadline.
