Patent short board or will become a stumbling block to the road of Xiaomi IPO

2018Year5Month3On the same day, Xiaomi officially submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.IPOApplication. According to people familiar with the matter, Xiaomi plans to passIPOraise at least100Billion US dollars, which may be followed by Alibaba2016YearIPOAfter the largest oneIPO.

Just as Xiaomi Company is actively preparingIPOThe critical period,5Month4On the 15th, Kupai, an established mobile phone manufacturer, suddenly issued a public announcement, claiming that it had filed infringement lawsuits and administrative requirements against Xiaomi Technology Co., Ltd. for infringing many of its invention patents, demanding Xiaomi to immediately stop producing and selling infringing mobile phone products, including red rice.Note4X, Xiaomi6, XiaomiMax2, XiaomiNote3and millet5XFive models. Subsequently, Xiaomi said that it had submitted invalid requests for several patents claimed by Coolpad, and hoped that the matter could be resolved fairly under the legal framework.

However, for Xiaomi, it is not the first time to face a patent lawsuit.2014Year12In January, Ericsson sued Xiaomi in the Delhi High Court of India for infringement of its ownARM,EDGE,3Gand other related8patent, and a "temporary injunction" was filed with the court and granted. The ban includes a "ban on the sale, promotion, manufacture and import of Xiaomi's related products suspected of patent infringement in the Indian market, and a requirement that Xiaomi and its e-commerce partners in India put down."FlipkartSuspend the sale of the patented products involved ". Not only that, the court also asked Xiaomi to provide sales data of the products involved in the case in India, and sent officials to Xiaomi's Indian office to implement the relevant resolutions. At the same time, it also issued a notice to the Indian Central Committee of Excise and Customs to prohibit Xiaomi's infringing products from entering the country. In the end, Xiaomi chose to compromise and prepay to the court on each device.100Under the premise of rupee deposit, Xiaomi can temporarily continue to sell smartphones equipped with Qualcomm chips in the Indian market, while phones equipped with MediaTek chips are in a "banned" state.

2015Millet continued to fall into the quagmire of patents,12Month19In the United States, Xiaomi was sold by a company calledBlueSpikeThe company sued the Marshall Branch of the U.S. District Court for the District of East Texas, which sued Xiaomi through.Tomtop(Shenzhen Tongtuo Technology, Xiaomi's Haitao platform in the United States) sells intelligent communication equipment suspected of infringing its patent rights in the United States.

while in2015At the same time, Xiaomi was also sued by the largest Dutch telecommunications company in China to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court.

In fact, for a hardware company like Xiaomi, the core is independent innovation technology. However, as a representative of the Internet mobile phone brand, Xiaomi showed a light asset image at the beginning of its establishment, completely like an assembly company, coupled with more successful Internet marketing methods, and accumulated a large number of users and sales. However, in order to speed up production and improve revenue efficiency, most enterprises are almost using off-the-shelf technology. Everything is only oriented to the final revenue results, and they don't care how much of the cost is given to other companies. It is undeniable that a choice like Xiaomi is also a helpless move. Early research and development and late landing require not only talents and funds, but also more time to try and make mistakes. In today's fast-paced world, many companies cannot afford to wait., And there is not so much technical capital investment. But for Chinese companies like Xiaomi, which are actively exploring overseas markets, patents are repeatedly becoming obstacles to their overseas markets. Perhaps it is the above-mentioned frequent patent litigation incidents that have forced Xiaomi, which has not paid much attention to innovation and patent accumulation, to look at patents again. However, due to too little investment in the early stage and a late start, Xiaomi can only try to use the strategy of hasty mergers and acquisitions to make up for its shortcomings in patents.

To this end,2015Year10Acquired Broadcom in January31wireless communications patents;2016Year2In January, Xiaomi bought from US chip giant Intel Corp.332US patent covering“Storage management, control logic, sequence coding, computer packaging, handheld terminals, circuit boards”and many other fields;2016Year6In January, Xiaomi bought it again from Microsoft.1500patents, etc. Thereafter2017Another purchase of patents of unknown quantity and quality from Nokia in. Of course, in addition to mergers and acquisitions, Xiaomi has also increased its efforts to apply for patents independently, and the number has also shown a rapid growth trend. According to the Xiaomi prospectus, as2018Year3Month31Xiaomi has obtained the China State Intellectual Property Office.3600A number of patents granted, there are10900Several patent applications are pending. At the same time, Xiaomi is registered in many overseas countries and jurisdictions (mainly the United States, Europe, India, Japan and Russia).3500Several patents, and5800Several patent applications are pending.

If millet in the patent side of the battle, follow-up to take, including mergers and acquisitions and independent applications and other ways to make up, but its patent side still has a greater risk.

First of all, Xiaomi's overseas patent layout is far from enough, including not only the number of patents, but also the quality of patents. Because of the existence of this short board, it is very difficult to expand overseas markets in the short term. Once they set foot in overseas markets, they will face a great risk of patent litigation. Allegedly, Xiaomi launched“Pine cones”One of the most important reasons for autonomous processor chips is to solve the patent problem in the Indian market; in the United States, Xiaomi has been sued for patent infringement in the United States many times, and relevant statistics show that mainstream American mobile phone companies are sued in the United States every year.20More than once, it can be seen that Xiaomi faces a great risk of patent litigation once it enters the U.S. market. As we all know, once a patent infringement lawsuit arises, it will have more serious consequences, suchHTCIt is precisely because of Apple'sHTCThe patent lawsuit, leading to its collapse, and even the development of the mobile phone business is now in name only.

Secondly, there is still a clear imbalance in the layout of Xiaomi's patents in the technical field. A large number of patented technologies are still stuck in the user interface and user experience, the real core hardware/The technology of chips and underlying communication protocols is still very lacking, and the development of these technologies requires a lot of resource investment and time accumulation. Obviously, it is extremely difficult for Xiaomi to make up for it in a short time by relying on its own strength.

Finally, the stability of Xiaomi's patents is also questionable. In the past few years, Xiaomi has30A utility model patent was declared invalid by others, in which,15All patents were declared invalid,7The patent was partially invalidated, only.8Patents are maintained. It can be seen that the quality of Xiaomi's own patents is not stable.

In the mobile phone industry, patent fees account for a considerable part of the product sales price, and almost every part of the mobile phone includes patent royalties. According to Xiaomi's prospectus,2017Part of Xiaomi's mobile phone revenue in806Billions of dollars to pay for intellectual property34Billions of dollars, as a percentage of revenue, is4.2%The industry believes that for companies like Xiaomi, the percentage of patent rates for a single mobile phone should be8%-10%This shows that Xiaomi still has a lot of patent fees to pay, and the risk of intellectual property litigation is extremely high.

Therefore, while paying attention to Xiaomi as an innovative enterprise, the industry should pay more attention to the value, strategy and current situation and position of Xiaomi's patents behind innovation, especially when Xiaomi will take overseas market expansion as the main driving force for growth in the future, patents are the biggest variable for the coexistence of Xiaomi's opportunities and risks. Some professionals believe that the patent lawsuit initiated by Coolpad may affect the outside world's valuation of Xiaomi and become Xiaomi.IPOA stumbling block in the road.

Article Source:http://tech.ifeng.com/a/20180507/44983594_0.shtml