BREAKING: Transsion escalates Ericsson patent litigation in UPC, files its first-ever public patent infringement complaint

Context:

• China’s Transsion, currently the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker, is embroiled in several global, high-profile cellular and video codec standard-essential patent (SEP) lawsuits, including by InterDigital in the UPC, India, and Brazil over cellular SEPs and video coding patents (October 31, 2025 ip fray article) and LG Electronics in India (January 20, 2026 ip fray article).
• One of the biggest cases Transsion is currently facing was initiated by Ericsson in November 2025, when it launched a global enforcement campaign over 4G and 5G-related standard-essential patents (SEPs) in Brazil, India, Nigeria, and three venues in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) (November 14, 2025 ip fray article). It then expanded its campaign to Indonesia, Colombia, and Morocco (December 19, 2025 ip fray article), and filed a third wave in Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Africa earlier this year (January 30, 2026 ip fray article). The campaign was significant in that it marked the first-ever public patent suits filed in Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, as well as the first time a major SEP owner such as Ericsson has filed a publicly-known SEP infringement suit in Morocco.

What’s new: Transsion has now sued Ericsson in the UPC’s Lisbon LD over the infringement of one of its own patents: EP4123910 (“Information indication method and related product”). The complaint, filed on March 6, 2026, has not yet been made public. 

Direct impact: This action marks the first time that Transsion has publicly sued another company over patent infringement, which indicates that the company is not ready to easily settle with Ericsson and is relatively confident in the strength of its own patent portfolio. It is too soon to say whether it may enforce its patents in other jurisdictions. The company has had some success in its litigation, settling with Qualcomm (January 16, 2025 ip fray article) and Philips (July 16, 2025 ip fray article), and Access Advance licensors NEC, JVC, Sun Patent Trust (July 17, 2025 ip fray article), Huawei (August 4, 2025 ip fray article), and Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) (August 18, 2025 ip fray article) through an HEVC license last year (December 1, 2025 ip fray article). Transsion also signed a patent license agreement with Nokia last January, without litigation (January 30, 2025 ip fray article).

Wider ramifications: The choice of court that Transsion filed its complaint in is interesting, as the UPC’s Lisbon LD previously denied a preliminary injunction request by Ericsson in a case against ASUSTek, ruling that there was a lack of urgency (October 15, 2024 ip fray article). However, the court also went beyond, finding that the patent-in-suit was valid and infringed, in an ultimate win for Ericsson.