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Category: WTO Sub-category: Intellectual Property
Document type: news
Telecommunication experts have said that China's smartphone companies are at a risk of becoming embroiled in disputes over intellectual property rights since many important patents are held by international companies like Google and Microsoft,
Moreover, this should be noted that the patents held are to do with physical designs rather than technologies.
The White Paper on Mobile Terminal, issued on 13th April 2012, by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR), argued that as home grown brands begin to dominate on the world stage the risk of them being hit with an IP suit by a foreign company has become very high.
Further studies have shown that in 2005, international mobile phone-makers occupied over half the Chinese market whereas in 2011 China shipped 455 million mobile phones, among which domestic brands made up 72%.
The experts say that as more Chinese mobile phones pour into the global market, it is much more likely that international rivals will use intellectual property rights as a weapon in competition.
China is the world's largest producer of mobile devices. In 2011, it produced 1.13 billion mobile devices, including mobile phones and tablet computers.
Experts have observed that the domestic brands like ZTE Corp, Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Lenovo Group Ltd have made significant progress in producing mobile phones in the year 2011.
In fact, ZTE's mobile device business earned around 27 billion yuan (over $4 billion) during the year.
Thus it will not be wrong to conclude that domestic phone-makers have gradually squeezed the market share of their overseas counterparts.
On the other hand, the international mobile companies often invest heavily in acquiring patents in the hopes of curbing competition through the use of patent lawsuits.
As a matter of fact, the market share of mobile operating systems remains dominated by international brands such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 (WP7), despite homegrown mobile OSes such as Baidu Yi and Aliyun.
However, this could possibly be viewed as a timely advice to the country's notorious white box manufacturers, who operate very much at the fringes of what could be deemed legitimate.
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China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) is the only telecom research institution of the Chinese government at the national level.
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