According to the verge.com, tech giants; Samsung and Huawei have finally agreed to settle their long running legal battle, which saw the two companies dueling over patents for smartphones in more than 40 lawsuits.
nikkei.com which says the settlement was also reported on local Chinese media, claims the two companies in question; Samsung and Huawei, likely wanted to redirect resources spent on the litigation wars, to other more essential areas. Especially with the increasingly difficult business environment.
The fact that Global smartphone shipments fell by 4.1% percent to 1.4 billion units in 2018 to mark a second straight year-on-year decline, according to U.S.-based International Data Corp), gives weight to the claim by nikkei.com.
The world’s biggest smartphone vendor (Samsung) and its leading Chinese rival (Huawei), reached the settlement through mediation by the Guangdong High People’s Court in southern China.
While the terms of the settlement have not yet been announced, the companies appear to have reached a general agreement which is supposed to move them closer to a cross-licensing deal for their patents.
They will also be dropping all lawsuits against one another.
The settlement appears to come at the perfect time, as the smartphone industry is facing a number of shifts with many smartphones gearing towards a move towards 5G in the next year and beyond, and the decline in shipments for some smartphone manufacturers, as a result of the already saturated market.
Huawei has managed to avoid that trend however, with its shipments since this last quarter, going up 50 percent year after year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Samsung on the other hand, has not been so lucky and that coupled with being on the losing side of the patent battle so far (according to the BBC in 2017), may have been reason enough, for the company to settle.
The legal battle between Samsung and Huawei began in 2016 when Huawei first sued Samsung for allegedly infringing on its LTE patents. Huawei had begun to see legal victories in China where it’s based, and the two began to settle at least one legal battle earlier this year (2019).
In April 2019, Apple and Qualcomm also settled their mega legal battle as well, which had also gone on for a multiple number of years and included countries in a duel over smartphone patents.
In the case of Apple and Qualcomm, it is very likely that 5G was a motivating factor in both companies settling because without a deal with Qualcomm, Apple would risked being at least a year behind rivals in shifting over to 5G.
