In the 20 years since it was founded, China’s Transsion has climbed the ranks from start-up to the largest smartphone manufacturer in Africa, to the fourth-largest in the world (after surpassing Chinese rival Oppo in 2023).
It currently trumps many emerging markets, holding a 40% share of the handset market in Africa, 40% in Pakistan, 29.2% in Bangladesh, and 5.7% in India (April 24, 2025 Transsion 2025 financial report). The Shenzhen-based company, sometimes dubbed the “Smartphone King of Africa”, first entered Nigeria with its TECNO and itel brands in 2008, and, by 2017, overtook Samsung to become the largest manufacturer of smartphones for the African market.
Chinese concerns
When the name Transsion was floated among major Chinese IP players a couple of years ago, it was met with little concern. The company does not operate in China and has not entered the U.S. or any European markets, so why worry, they said. But this quickly changed as the company began getting hit with patent infringement complaints by some of the world’s biggest standard-essential patent (SEP) licensors (including 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)).
And now, as the company filed its first-ever publicly-known patent infringement complaint against Ericsson last week (March 6, 2026 ip fray article), the name is starting to turn a lot of heads in China. And, according to a source speaking on the condition of anonymity, for reasons beyond just this case:
“Against a backdrop of broader economic headwinds, royalty payments are no longer just a question of how to divide profit; for manufacturers at the low end of the market (which is Transsion’s entire business model), they can genuinely threaten viability. That concentrates minds.”
The wider strategic question that implementers in China are specifically watching closely is what happens to SEP enforcement in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, or Morocco. These markets, according to the source, were “previously written off as enforcement dead zones”, but Ericsson has now filed complaints against Transsion in these jurisdictions, as well as Brazil, India, Nigeria, three venues in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) (November 14, 2025 ip fray article), Colombia (December 19, 2025 ip fray article), Thailand, the Philippines, and South Africa (January 30, 2026 ip fray article), over its 4G and 5G SEPs.
If Ericsson were to win injunctions in these venues, Chinese manufacturers would need to rethink their patent-filing strategies in those jurisdictions significantly, and this case could end up being a data point that reshapes how the whole industry thinks about emerging market IP risk.
IPO pressure
Transsion 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). It also signed a patent license agreement with Nokia last January, without litigation (January 30, 2025 ip fray article).
So why has the process with Ericsson diverged so much?
The source, continuing to speak on the condition of anonymity, notes that as Transsion is in the middle of its process for an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (December 2, 2025 Transsion IPO announcement), and its financials have been under pressure (its net profit for the first half of 2025 was roughly 1.24 billion Chinese yuan ($179 million), which is well below prior periods), paying a substantial royalty right now would “make the numbers look very bad at exactly the wrong moment”. Given this logic, the source also speculates that the company could adopt the same “hardline” approach toward LG and InterDigital.
The company has been quietly building up its patent portfolio, likely in an attempt to strengthen its negotiation powers. Transsion’s 2024 annual financial report reveals that it accrued an additional 224 patents in 2024, now boasting a portfolio of over 1,200 patents (April 24, 2025 Transsion 2025 financial report).
But, while it notes on its website that it is eager to penetrate markets beyond Africa, as of 2024, it had not yet filed patents in countries outside China, Europe, or the U.S. In fact, around 96% of its patent applications were filed in the CNIPA, with the remainder in the European Patent Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This may explain why it chose the UPC’s Lisbon Local Division (LD) to target Ericsson first (although it is too soon to say if it has filed complaints elsewhere).
Transsion’s application for the HK IPO in December, which investors predicted could allow it to raise up to $1 billion, is therefore crucial (although it should be noted that this was a secondary listing, as it is already listed on the STAR Market (Shanghai’s stock market). Its filing (see here for full doc: December 2, 2025 Transsion IPO application) sheds light on its current SEP situation, given Hong Kong’s more stringent disclosure requirements in relation to “Risk Factors”:
- The “Regional Rate” Strategy: Transsion argues that because it chiefly operates in emerging markets, it should not pay the same “global” royalty rates as implementers such as Apple or Samsung, whose Average Selling Prices are much higher. This strategy is apparently central to its defense against Ericsson.
- Active license agreements and litigation risks: unlike its previous, more conservative approach, Transsion has listed all of the companies it currently has a 5G license agreement with (Nokia, Qualcomm, Access Advance, and Philips), and noted that it is embroiled in litigation with Ericsson, InterDigital, and LG Electronics.
Of course, while we already knew about the second point, the first point confirms that Transsion will not be treading forward lightly in its dispute with Ericsson.
According to an anonymous source, Transsion is in a “structurally stronger position than it looks” for two main reasons:
- Transsion’s core markets are jurisdictions where rights holders have historically filed very few SEPs, precisely because patent enforcement there is difficult. And this, according to the source, dramatically reduces the injunction pressure Transsion faces compared to a manufacturer selling primarily in Europe or the U.S.
- Chinese courts applying the top-down approach have tended to set FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) rates at the lower end, and defendants in China can, and do, use SEP disputes as an opening to file antitrust counterclaims. So this makes Chinese proceedings “unattractive” for many SEP holders. Transsion has thus been able to resist SEP licensing pressure longer than any other major Chinese handset maker (it is the last one without a deal with all the major IP owners).