Top Chinese court declines to transfer Huawei v. MediaTek SEP cases to Beijing or to separate claims against different defendants

Context: Huawei and MediaTek are embroiled in multijurisdictional litigation over standard-essential patents (SEPs). For example, two cases filed with the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Munich Local Division (LD) showed up last month (April 11, 2025 ip fray article). MediaTek’s preference would be for the entire dispute to be resolved in the UK (April 15, 2025 ip fray article). But it was always clear that China is the primary jurisdiction, with MediaTek manufacturing its chipsets and having its top 10 customers in that country.

What’s new: Parallel decisions made by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of China in two Huawei v. MediaTek cases have meanwhile been published. We have downloaded them and analyzed them based on machine translations. The upshot is that both of those SEP infringement actions remain in the Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court (as opposed to being transferred to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court), and Huawei was within its rights to sue a manufacturing entity and a distribution entity in the same case.

Direct impact & wider ramifications: No substantive question had to be addressed at this stage. This is purely procedural. It appears that MediaTek primarily wanted to slow down the Chinese proceedings.

There isn’t much to add about what the two parallel and perfectly consistent decisions say:

MediaTek’s connection with China, and with the Guangdong Province in particular, is strong. The decisions don’t even have to discuss in detail whether Beijing would be the appropriate venue because Guangzhou clearly is.

The Mediatek entities that manufacture and sell the chipsets in question work hand in hand. Moreover, the decisions note that MediaTek took the opposite view on whether one can sue a chipset maker and a sales company in the same case when the shoe was on the other foot in a case in which MediaTek is presumably suing Huawei and one of its resellers (Suning.com). As a result, the SPC affirmed the Guangzhou court’s decision to decline to sever the claims against one defendant entity from those against another. The appellate decision notes that this is a special case of a necessary joinder.