Huawei sues MediaTek for infringing on its patents; Chinese manufacturer is trying to raise cash

Here's a sentence that I can't remember writing before during my 15+ years at PhoneArena: Huawei is suing MediaTek in a Chinese district court. The latter allegedly infringed on Huawei's Intellectual Property. Huawei owns a ton of patents related to mobile technologies including 20% of the world's 5G patents. The tech firm also has extensive holdings of standard-essential patents (SEP) which are patents required to meet certain industry standards. As a result, they are supposed to be licensed using fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

The Chinese manufacturer has been working to collect unpaid royalties ever since the U.S. cracked down on the company by putting it on the Entity List in 2019. The following year, the U.S. Commerce Department changed its export rules by preventing foundries using American tech to build chips from shipping cutting-edge silicon to Huawei. That put a halt to Huawei's HiSilicon chip business which designed chips for the company's phones. Before the change to the U.S. export rule, Huawei was TSMC's second-largest customer after Apple.

A source cited by Nikkei Asia says that Huawei filed the suit against MediaTek to collect royalty fees that it can invest in Research & Development. The same person added that Huawei also filed the suit to show the world the strength of the company's tech capabilities. Another source said that the company has filed lawsuits against several companies looking to find additional sources of revenue after its smartphone business. In 2022, Huawei generated $560 million in revenue from patents.

For example, last year Huawei sued to collect licensing fees from 30 small and mid-sized Japanese firms that were using its patented technologies without permission. Nikkei Asia says that approximately 200 companies currently pay royalties to Huawei. Last year the manufacturer signed off on cross-licensing 5G deals with major mobile tech firms such as Oppo and Samsung. It also has cross-licensing deals with European automakers such as Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, Audi, BMW and Porsche.

MediaTek is the top vendor of application processors (AP) for smartphones worldwide. The current flagship Dimensity 9300 AP has a unique configuration using no efficiency cores; the Dimensity 9400 AP is expected to be announced during the fourth quarter of this year with a configuration rumored to consist of one Cortex-X5 Prime CPU core, four Cortex-X4 Prime CPU cores, and four Cortex-A720 performance CPU cores. Earlier today we told you that Oppo's next flagship is expected to be powered by the Dimensity 9400 SoC.