On July 4, the National Intellectual Property Administration of China announced that Xiaomi had filed a request to invalidate Huawei’s patent for “a lock screen method and mobile terminal”, which will be heard on July 21.

The hearing is a way of resolving patent disputes in China, where the invalidating party and the defending party present their arguments and reasons for their patent validity in court. Xiaomi and Huawei have been involved in patent disputes for a long time. On March 1 this year, according to the announcement of “Major Patent Infringement Dispute Administrative Decision Acceptance” published on page 02 of China Intellectual Property News, Huawei had sued Xiaomi for infringing four patents. The patents involved in this dispute mainly cover 4G/LTE technology, mobile photography and unlocking technology.

According to the information disclosed by the case, the announcement showed that on January 17, 2023, the National Intellectual Property Administration accepted the case filed by Huawei against Xiaomi for infringing its four Chinese patents. The four patents involved in this dispute are “a method and device for sending control signaling”, “a method, base station and user equipment for feeding back ACK/NACK information during carrier aggregation”, “a method and terminal for obtaining a panoramic image”, and “a lock screen method and mobile terminal”.

From the patent content, cases 1 and 2 involve 4G/LTE technology, which are standard essential patents (SEP). Cases 3 and 4 involve mobile photography and unlocking technology, which are non-SEP patents.

In response, Xiaomi said: “The two sides are actively negotiating on patent licensing; China’s intellectual property protection system provides a diversified solution mechanism, including administrative and judicial mediation. It is an industry practice to use a third-party mediation mechanism to solve licensing issues; Huawei and Xiaomi both believe that intellectual property licensing and cooperation are conducive to promoting innovation and public interest, and that mediation is an effective channel to help reach licensing agreements. While continuing to actively negotiate, the two sides seek to use diversified mediation mechanisms to assist the two sides in reaching an agreement.” Huawei did not respond to this matter.

On December 14, 2022, Xiaomi Group released its first intellectual property white paper and talked about its intellectual property layout for the first time. Wang Xiang, then president of Xiaomi Group and who has since left, said that Xiaomi has signed many cross-licensing agreements, and the intellectual property competition situation it faces has improved compared with six years ago or even ten years ago, but it faces more new challenges. One is that Xiaomi has grown bigger, from a “little brother” to a “target”; another is the change of international political and economic situation, which brings new challenges.

As of now, Xiaomi’s technology research and development has entered 12 technology fields, including 5G mobile communication technology, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Based on intelligent manufacturing, it has also entered robotics, unmanned factories, intelligent electric vehicles and other fields, with a total of 98 sub-fields.

Previously, Huawei had disclosed its patent income situation. It had received about $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in patent licensing revenue from around the world from 2019 to 2021. Huawei also said that it had started to charge 5G patent licensing fees to the market in 2021, setting different fee rates according to the phone price and setting a price cap of $2.5 per phone.