A Paris district court has dismissed an infringement claim against ZTE by its fellow Chinese competitor Huawei Technologies.
In a decision handed down on March 28, the court rejected all of Huawei’s claims on patent infringement focusing on the EP724 data card. The French ruling follows similar rulings issued in China and Germany.
The Paris court dismissed Huawei’s claim over the “rotator head” data card patent, citing the patent’s “lack of novelty”. The court also ordered Huawei to pay €100,000 ($128,532) in damages to ZTE and ZTE’s subsidiary in France.
ZTE has won numerous patent rulings against Huawei in different jurisdictions in the past two years, as the company defends more than 10 patent infringement claims initiated by Huawei in courts in Europe, ZTE said in a statement.
In June 2012, China’s State Intellectual Property Office ruled Huawei’s claim to the same data card patent invalid. In October 2012, the German Federal Patent Court issued a preliminary verdict making the patent in question invalid, and rejected six of Huawei’s modification proposals.
The French patent case marks ZTE’s latest wins in the patent dispute with Huawei. Earlier a district court in Germany has dismissed all of Huawei's claims against ZTE in litigation over patents related to LTE base stations and mobile terminals. The Germany court also referred an infringement case between the two companies over 4G technology to the European Court of Justice.