Smartphone Patent War 2012: Chinese Alliance vs International Brands

The battlefield of patents are more and more the place where competitors are vying for market share. China has become the world's largest market for smart phones in the third quarter of 2011, according to Strategy Analytics. Some Chinese smartphone makers, including Lenovo, ZTE, TCL, Coolpad and Konka joined forces to protect themselves against the rising number of claims of patent infringement by international smartphone manufacturers, such as Apple, Nokia and Microsoft, and to dominate China's domestic market.
Huawei has around 65,000 patents and also ZTE has a substantial number of patents for wireless communication technologies. According to Erica Yen and Steve Shen of Digitimes many Chinese smart phone makers develop localized interfaces and even operation systems, see here.

Chinese smartphone manufacturers also launch their products via China-based telecom carriers and social networking websites operators, via dual branding. HTC and Sony Ericsson grew rapidly because their Android models were popular in major cities of east and south China, according to Linda Sui of Strategy Analytics. If China Telecom will launch the CDMA iPhone 4S early next year, Ms Sui expects Apple's market share to peak. Globally Nokia is still number one, closely followed by Samsung and Apple.

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How To Transform The Image of Chinese Brands? Hint ... It's Not Product Placements

Product Placements 

Some movies have become a series of commercials with a story line. Thanks to the lucrative business of product placements. Transformers (变形金刚) 3 which opened in cinemas in China on July 21, 2011 shows an abundance of Chinese brands:

• Yili: Shuhua Milk
• Meters/bonwe: M-Tee
• Lenovo: Ideacentre A series
• TCL (The Creative Life): HDTV range

Yili milk is trying to transform its image with the product placement after the melamine induced total recall in 2008, see here. 

Read Daniel Gilroy's Advertising China Smack article about it here.

However, companies that really want to build a great reputation globally and domestically should focus even more on quality programmes, in order to make the quality of their products consistent, and they should be able to guarantee the safety of the complete supply chain, coupled to superior service that informs their customers about quality, the supply chain and the points of sale.  

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LG Electronics Brings Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Thomson TCL

Korea Newswire reports about LG Electronics who presented a lawsuit against Thomson TCL Electronics (TTE), the French-Chinese TV maker, and its Hong Kong based holding company TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings for the infringement of four of its patents. LG Electronics filed the lawsuit at the US District Court, Eastern District of Texas and demands an injunction and damages. Consultations, since 2005, between LG Electronics and TTE did not resolve the problem.

Read Korea Newswire's story here.

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