Context: Singapore-headquartered Maxeon, a back-contact (BC) solar pioneer majority-owned by TCL Zhonghuan, and Shanghai-listed Chinese photovoltaic manufacturer Aiko Solar settled their European patent dispute in February 2026 through a $238 million licensing deal (February 10, 2026 ip fray article). Under the agreement, Aiko obtained rights to Maxeon’s existing BC cell and module patents outside the US, as well as relevant patents added during the following five years. In addition to ending the publicly disclosed proceedings before the Mannheim and Munich I Regional Courts, the District Court of The Hague and the UPC’s Düsseldorf Local Division, the companies stated that Aiko would terminate its invalidation efforts against Maxeon’s patents.
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- China National Intellectual Property Administration, Invalidation Decision No. 562609, Case No. 4W115426, June 29, 2023. The decision records that the invalidation request was filed on November 30, 2022, against Chinese Patent No. 200980122033.0 and declares all 15 claims invalid. ↩︎
- PurpleVine IP, “Supreme People’s Court Overturns Prior Rulings, Validating Maxeon’s Core BC Patent in Second Instance”, July 03, 2026. The report states that the Beijing IP Court upheld the CNIPA decision in January 2025 and that, on June 30, 2026, the SPC found all claims inventive except method claim 7. It also identifies the Chinese patent as the counterpart of EP3065184B1 (link). ↩︎
- Maxeon Solar Technologies, “Defense of Innovation Continues as Maxeon Solar Technologies Initiates Unitary Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Aiko and its Partners,” June 19, 2024 (link). ↩︎
- Maxeon Solar Technologies, “Maxeon Announces Restructuring of Business Portfolio,” November 26, 2024, stating that Maxeon would focus exclusively on the US market following the restructuring of its non-US businesses (link). ↩︎
- Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People’s Court, Annual Report 2025, pp. 53 and 56. The Court modified 117 of 1,473 second-instance substantive administrative cases in 2025 and 450 of 6,195 such cases from 2019 to 2025. ↩︎
- CNIPA, Invalidation Decision No. 562609 concerning Chinese patent No. 200980122033.0, June 29, 2023 (finding claim 7 lacking novelty and claims 1–6 and 8–15 lacking inventiveness). ↩︎
- PurpleVine IP, “Supreme People’s Court Overturns Prior Rulings, Validating Maxeon’s Core BC Patent in Second Instance,” July 3, 2026 (identifying the lack of a factual basis for the lower tribunal’s common-knowledge finding as a central issue on appeal and reporting that the SPC required inventiveness to be assessed in light of the state of technological development before the patent’s priority date) (link). ↩︎
- CNIPA, “Interpretation of the 2023 Amendments to the Patent Examination Guidelines (III),” January 18, 2024. CNIPA explains that, when common general knowledge is relied on as a technical teaching, the decision-maker should explain why the relevant technical means was commonly known for solving the particular technical problem, and emphasizes avoiding hindsight in inventiveness analysis. ↩︎