Qualcomm's antitrust case seems to have been a loss to millet technology.

Qualcomm's antitrust case seems to have made millet technology a bit of a loss, banning the sale of its branded handsets in the Indian market and giving the millet blow intent to expand the international market. Various indications that the lack of intellectual property rights and a small number of patented technology has become the future development of millet technology weakness. Millet's international market journey can be smoothly, perhaps in millet how to form their own patent portfolio.

The Indian Supreme Court recently issued a ban on millet technology, ordering millet to immediately stop selling and importing millet handsets on the Indian market. The news comes as most people, including us, are beginning to wonder whether Chinese smartphone makers have enough intellectual property to support their business abroad. Behind the ban, communications giant Ericsson (Ericsson) claimed that Millet technology violated its patent rights in India.

red meter 1s mobile phone, using MediaTek technology production of the processor, has been briefly banned (Hunt Cloud Network editor June log in to Millet India website, found that now can not buy red m 1s. Of course, it may be out of stock status. , but Millet repeatedly argued that the company would not stop landing in the Indian market because of intellectual property problems. Millet Company has been established 4.5, now millet technology products have been sold in 7 Asian countries, more market expansion plans in the intensive preparations, including this year to enter the Latin American market.

So it seems that millet should be given high attention to intellectual property rights? Whenever Millet into a new market, the new legal loophole followed. If Millet does not have a patent layout to protect its intellectual property, in the near future millet technology is bound to face more prosecutions, the Indian market ban is only a start.

The importance of patents is self-evident, in short, for two main reasons. First, the cost of the patent has been reduced. Millet technology, for example, must pay a royalty to the latter in order to be able to use Ericsson's technology on its mobile phone. Second, if the technology companies want to sue for patent infringement (the mobile phone industry's patent infringement occurs), the transfer of patents is the most common litigation solution. The practice of using patents as trading chips is commonly referred to as cross licensing, which means that in the face of patent infringement prosecutions, millet technology can be used to allow the other party to use their own patents in exchange for the settlement of prosecutions.

To get a clearer picture of the current situation of millet technology, we have found some data from the patent application public databases of the two organizations, the National Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Then we compared the patent data of millet and several other Chinese handset makers, including Oppo, the Cool, The Phantom, ZTE and Huawei, as well as the best-selling Apple and Samsung in China.

Real Data comparisons

For these companies, we identified the number of patent applications that they reported to the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which was widely recognized in some or all of the Member States, as well as the number of patent applications submitted to China's Sipo, including invention patents, design patents, and patents being applied. It is noteworthy that the Sipo patent is only recognised in China.

China smartphone manufacturers patent comparison

PCT Patent: Treaty on Patent Cooperation | CN patents Pending: Patent in Application (SIPO) | CN Patents Granted: Authorized patent (SIPO) | CN Design Patents: Designing patent (SIPO)

As the picture shows, Samsung, ZTE and Huawei patents are far more numerous than millet and other companies. But given that the three companies ' products are not limited to smartphones, it may be unfair. Samsung's brand products include smartphones, laptops, speakers and kitchen appliances. ZTE and Huawei are major telecommunications equipment manufacturers, responsible for building national 4G network infrastructure and so on. In any industry, ZTE and Huawei are China's two largest patent holders. And these three companies are older, so they have more time to accumulate their own patent layout. In short, the comparison of the above charts alone does not explain too many problems. Then let's look at the comparison of the remaining companies.

PCT Patent: Treaty on Patent Cooperation | CN patents Pending: Patent in Application (SIPO) | CN Patents Granted: Authorized patent (SIPO) | CN Design Patents: Designing patent (SIPO)

This icon is more descriptive than the former. In this table, we have made some adjustments to Apple's data. We only count the number of patents that Apple has declared since it was renamed Apple. Because Apple changed its official name from Apple Computer to Apple in 2007, the year the first iphone went public. Such comparisons are more equitable for millet and other emerging smartphone makers.

The challenges that millet is about to face

From the above data, we can see what the millet in China will face from the legal issues? If Millet is now suspending patent applications and continues to insist on expanding its market to other countries, this is clearly not a sensible move. In fact, compared with Apple's patent lawsuits in the domestic and foreign markets, the problem of millet is simply not enough. Moreover, Millet has only 28 patents in China, a bit less than other smaller local companies such as Oppo and Coolpad.

But Millet also has no zuochishankong on intellectual property issues. In our statistics, millet reported to the PCT patent application a total of 130, of which 100 applications were submitted last year, and in the past two months, Millet reported 19 applications. From these data analysis, millet technology has been aware of its imminent crisis, is in an unprecedented enthusiasm to step up the pace of building their own intellectual property portfolio.

Oppo set an important standard, and we can compare it to millet. Because they operate on many similar international markets, their product lines have a lot in common. Although Oppo has more patent portfolios in China, including those that are being applied for, it is not as well on the international market as millet.

It is also noteworthy that we cannot find any patents belonging to OnePlus, whether in China or PCT. OnePlus last year unveiled its first smartphone, one of Millet's rivals. We speculate that all OnePlus patents belong to Oppo, although Oppo has stated that OnePlus is a completely independent company, but the two have the same manufacturing resources, the same investors, and the same office building. (The above news has not been confirmed, we are further to OnePlus to prove.) )

However, despite the efforts of Millet, its patent portfolio has no advantage over most competitors, especially those from the global market. To be honest, I really admire the fact that millet still rushes to the Indian market without precedent. But, how to say, although the status quo is not ideal, but Millet is aware of the importance of intellectual property rights and is moving in this direction. The only question is whether the pace of intellectual property development can keep pace with its market expansion. In China, a patent application cycle is usually 18-24 months. During this period, millet may have entered the market in many countries.

So much so, how many patents does a company have, is this number really that important? Edgatton (Ed Chatterton) gave an explanation. He is a partner with DLA Piper of Hong Kong intellectual property and technology time law firm, and also provides professional support for this report. He said that comparing the number of authorized patents in the company's patent portfolio "can provide a general reference but still need to keep in mind the number of the quantity does not directly indicate the quality of the good or bad." "Therefore, the increase in the number of patents at the same time need to improve the quality of patents."

Perhaps you will be puzzled, millet technology in the United States (excluding PCT patent) has only two patents. One of the patents is the portable mobile power supply of millet. Thus, we can infer that Millet's first product into the U.S. market is very likely to be mobile power products. We will wait and see what the future holds.