Huawei has accused Motorola of transferring parts of their intellectual property to NSN

Huawei has won a restraining order against Motorola preventing it from sharing any confidential information about Huawei’s technology with Motorola Networks’ perspective buyer, Nokia Siemens Networks.
Huawei sued Motorola and NSN in U.S. District Court this week, attempting to block the transfer of the GSM portion of Moto’s commercial networks business to its Huawei’s European competitor.
The European equipment manufacturer acquired Motorola’s telecommunications division recently for 1.2 billion dollars. Huawei was previously in the running for this acquisition but didn’t obtain US regulatory authorisation despite a better offer.
At issue is an old joint venture between Huawei and Motorola, which we first reported on in 2006, when Motorola began to sell Huawei UMTS and high-speed packet access (HSPA) gear under the Motorola name.
The Chinese group confirms that they have been in partnership with Motorola since the years 2000, working on the development of various projects like radio waves and network cores, with the American group even selling Huawei manufactured hardware under their own brand.
Motorola had previously signed an agreement to keep Huawei’s intellectual property and technologies secret, with their involvement only being as a reseller. Part of this intellectual property has been integrated, without authorisation, into the Nokia Siemens Networks acquisition.
Motorola effectively ended its own UMTS development at the time, leaving only the GSM, CDMA and WiMax businesses to NSN when it came knocking with a $1.2 billion offer this summer. But Moto’s GSM and Huawei’s UMTS arms are closely tied together due to the joint venture, which was aimed at selling HSPA networks to Moto’s GSM installed base. Huawei has claimed in its lawsuit that Moto hasn’t provided adequate assurances that Moto won’t be handing over Huawei’s intellectual property and confidential information to NSN during the transfer of assets.
In arguments before U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Coleman, attorneys for NSN and Motorola warned that the injunction could scuttle the deal between the two vendors entirely, but Coleman went ahead with the court order, giving Motorola 24 hours to notify her once the deal gets clearance from Chinese regulators.
The Chinese equipment manufacturer is looking to protect their research and development – with close to half of their 100 000 employees being affected by this activity. With 10% of their annual revenue being allocated to R&D, the company controls an enormous holding of almost 50 000 patents.
Motorola is separating their telecommunications equipment, with the split creating two distinct entities: Motorola Mobility (mobile handsets, set-top-boxes) and Motorola Solutions (professional mobile solutions, professional PDA’s).