Huawei has taken pre-emptive action against Motorola and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) to protect its intellectual property.
The Chinese telecom solutions provider successfully imposed a preliminary injunction that blocks Motorola from disclosing Huawei’s intellectual property to NSN which recently began an acquisition of Motorola’s wireless assets.
“This legal action was carried out only after Motorola was unable to assure us that they would meet their contractual obligations to protect our intellectual property, we have no interest in stopping the transaction between Motorola and our direct competitor. We will, however, do whatever is required to protect the product of our company’s many years of innovation,” said Huawei Technologies Media Relations Manager, Luke Coleman.
Huawei began developing new cellular communications networks and selling them to Motorola who rebadged and sold the technologies since 2000. Since then, Motorola has purchased around $878 million in Huawei equipment.
Huawei provided Motorola with confidential information on its intellectual property so that Motorola could service customers and repair products under non-disclosure agreements.
With NSN buying Motorola assets, the company will need to access confidential information sent between Motorola and Huawei to provide existing customers with the same level of product support Motorola offered before it split its company and sold parts of it off.
Huawei took the companies to the US Federal Court to protect its assets from NSN as it is a direct competitor in the wireless networks infrastructure business.
The transaction between NSN and Motorola was originally delayed by China’s Ministry of Commerce who still had to approve on antitrust grounds, but Huawei’s legal action is further delaying the acquisition.
