China issues injunctions against most Apple iPhone models – that was quick

The week after the US arranged the arrest of a Huawei exec China has granted Qualcomm an injunction prohibiting the sales of most Apple smartphones in the country. Coincidence?

Qualcomm and Apple have been at war for months over what the former charges the latter to use its technology in its devices. Apple wants to pay less and Qualcomm would rather it didn’t. A proxy war has ensued in which various regulators suddenly got hold of a bunch of dirt on Qualcomm and Apple has found itself accused of playing fast and loose with intellectual property.

They have both landed telling blows but the most recent round went to Qualcomm, with the Fuzhou Intermediate People’s Court in China granting its request for two preliminary injunctions against four Chinese subsidiaries of Apple to stop them selling importing and selling the following iPhone models: 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and X. In other words all of them bar the most recent ones, which apparently don’t use the offending patents.

“We deeply value our relationships with customers, rarely resorting to the courts for assistance, but we also have an abiding belief in the need to protect intellectual property rights,” said Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm General Counsel. “Apple continues to benefit from our intellectual property while refusing to compensate us. These Court orders are further confirmation of the strength of Qualcomm’s vast patent portfolio.”

The patents themselves seem relatively trivial and concern the user interface rather than core Qualcomm stuff like modems. They ‘enable consumers to adjust and reformat the size and appearance of photographs, and to manage applications using a touch screen when viewing, navigating and dismissing applications on their phones.’

Patent disputes are rarely about the significance of patents themselves, which are usually used as pawns in a greater battle of wills. You do have to wonder, however, since Apple seems to be able to cope just fine without them and UI software is a core strength, why it didn’t just develop its own way of doing that stuff in-house.

Apple will, of course, appeal, and the WSJ was the lucky recipient of a generic quote from one of its spokespeople. “Qualcomm’s effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world,” it went.

What is not known is how much encouragement the Chinese state gave to the Fuzhou Intermediate People’s Court to find against one of the US’s greatest business champions. It was generally assumed that the arrest of Huawei’s CFO would result in repercussions and the timing of this decision is intriguing.

It’s especially ironic that Qualcomm has been used as a vector for the latest offensive in the great Sino-American trade war since it’s widely suspected that China blocked Qualcomm’s acquisition of NXP in retaliation for the US intervening on the proposed acquisition of Qualcomm by Broadcom. It could all just be a coincidence, of course, but anything involving the US and China seems likely to be at the very least tainted by politics.