Context: The appellant no. 2 applied for the patent in October 2006, was granted Indian Patent No. 244963 (“A Communication Device Finder System”) in December 2010, and assigned it to Conqueror Innovations Private Limited in April 2021. The two sued Xiaomi Technology India before the Delhi High Court (HC) in May 2023, alleging that the ‘anti-theft kill switch tool’ in Xiaomi’s smartphones, tablets, Mi Pads, laptops, and notebooks implements the suit patent. They pleaded that the patent’s essential features are enlisted in two International Telecommunication Union (ITU) recommendations on mobile phone anti-theft measures and on combating the use of stolen devices, and their January 2023 legal notice offered Xiaomi a non-exclusive licence at fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) royalty rates. A single judge dismissed the interim injunction applications on July 4, 2025. In the appeal, the appellants dropped the standard-essential patent (SEP) framing entirely and pressed only direct infringement.
What’s new: A Division Bench (DB) has dismissed the appeal, in a judgment delivered on September 7, 2026. The bench held that Xiaomi’s ‘Find Device’ feature does not prima facie infringe Element E2 or Element E3 of Independent Claim 1. The appellants’ construction of both elements on appeal departs from their own pleaded case and amounts to a “post-facto reconsideration” of their infringement claims. And the roughly nine-year delay in suing was “by itself, a sufficient ground to not grant an interim injunction”.
Direct impact: Xiaomi faces no injunction, and the point is close to spent in any event: the suit patent expires on October 17, 2026, and the bench noted that any injunction it granted would have run for under two months. What survives is the single judge’s direction that Xiaomi maintain complete accounts of manufacture and sale and file them half-yearly. The suit continues before him for damages. The DB clarified that all observations are prima facie and that the single judge must weigh the evidence at trial uninfluenced by them.
Wider ramifications: The portable holding is on delay. Rather than folding the nine-year gap into a multi-factor balance of convenience assessment, the bench held that prolonged and conscious delay evidences lack of urgency, is on its own sufficient to refuse an injunction, and leaves such a plaintiff to prove infringement at trial and claim damages.
In April 2026, in Malikie v. Xiaomi, a single judge of the same court treated Xiaomi Corporation’s Cayman Islands incorporation, its lack of Indian assets and the Enforcement Directorate seizure against Xiaomi Technology India as creating a genuine apprehension about recoverability, and ordered pro tem security (May 4, 2026 ip fray article). Here the same material, pressed by the appellants to show that damages would be inadequate, was found to have no substance below and was not disturbed on appeal.
Here is the Division Bench judgment, delivered on September 7, 2026:
The appellants dropped the SEP theory before arguing
The plaint was built as a standards case. The appellants pleaded that the patent’s essential features were enlisted as essential requirements of a standard published by a standard setting organisation, pleaded that the impugned devices comply with the two ITU recommendations, and offered a FRAND licence by notice. Their scientific advisor’s opinion concluded that Elements E2 and E3 were identical in both standards, reaching E3 through the CTIA Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment and what Google’s Android OS permits a device owner to do.
None of it was argued. The appellants clarified that they were not pressing for injunctive relief on the SEP basis. The essentiality material worked against them, the scientific advisor’s own account of what Element E2 requires became the standard by which the bench measured Xiaomi’s devices.
The message center number the appellants could not write out of their own claim
Element E2 claims a security activation element (SAE) in flash memory with an auto re-install option for data including a message center number, and/or a non-erasable ROM containing that data. The case pleaded below was that the SAE sits in flash memory and ROM, with Android letting the owner install third-party applications that render the data non-erasable. On appeal it narrowed sharply: a diagram captioned “Second Option in ROM” equated the SAE data with Find Device as installed by the manufacturer, with no message center number in it at all. The two implementations are disjunctive, the appellants said, and the number cannot technically be stored in ROM anyway. Xiaomi’s answer was that had ROM alone sufficed, there would have been no occasion to plead third-party software in the first place.
The bench found the pleading at variance with the submissions and called the new position a post-facto reconsideration prompted by the findings below, a distortion of the claim. It then held the construction bad on its own terms. The objective of E2 is to keep the SAE data non-erasable after theft so the owner can reach the handset by message or call; isolating ROM from the message center number would mean not reading a material part of the claim. There is concededly no flash memory in Xiaomi’s devices holding the number, and on the appellants’ own case it could not sit in ROM either. Their fallback, that a stolen device might find a Wi-Fi network, was fundamentally inconsistent: a patentee cannot call the number essential in flash memory and dispensable in ROM. That would render the stipulation otiose, the more so for a 2006 invention in which the patentee presumed a SIM as the thing that makes the connection.
The ‘auto-answer mode’ means what the patentee said it meant
The appellants argued that the single judge had travelled beyond the claim by importing a definition from the description: the words ‘phone’, ‘incoming calls’ and ‘silently’ appear nowhere in E3. Since Find Device can be triggered by signing into the owner’s Xiaomi account from a browser on another device, they said, that sub-feature infringes.
The plaint defines auto answer mode as set ON with silent mode so that all incoming calls are answered at the first ring without the thief’s knowledge, letting the caller hear the conversation of the person holding the stolen device. The single judge introduced no new limitation rather he construed the term as the patentee had described, pleaded and relied on it. The bench said it failed to understand on what other basis the phrase could have been interpreted, and was unable to accept the complaint that the invention had been mistaken for a ‘snooping device’.
A novelty trap followed. Remote activation of a lost device was already disclosed in prior art acknowledged in the suit patent itself, US 7,103,367 (“Network-based services for misplaced cellular mobile stations”) and EP1684535 (“System and method for remotely locating a lost mobile communication device”). If auto-answer mode meant no more than remote activation, the claim would not survive those references. What the patent claimed as characteristic was what happens after the trigger, silent activation letting an authorized person listen in without alerting the thief.
Find Device offers three options, Sound Mode, Lost Mode, which locks the handset while still permitting ordinary incoming calls, and Erase Data. None reinstalls deleted data or answers a call silently. It is also inoperable once the device is factory reset, whereas on the appellants’ own case the SAE cannot be erased at all. Having found Claim 1 not infringed, the bench held there was no need to examine dependent Claims 2, 4, 5 and 9.
Delay, standing alone
Xiaomi has sold the devices in India since 2014, which the appellants did not dispute. Form-27 (patent working statement filed annually before the Indian Patent Office) for April 2015, filed by Appellant No. 2 at the patent office, shows the patentee was aware at that time of mobile manufacturers using technologies he considered infringing. He did not sue until 2023. The answer that the delay cannot in any event defeat statutory patent rights, did not survive that entry. Separately, the Forms 27 for 2011 to 2022 showed the patent had hardly been worked in India. On those facts the bench held that prolonged and conscious delay is by itself a sufficient ground to refuse an interim injunction, and that the single judge was justified in declining relief on the sole ground of delay.
Court and counsel
Delhi High Court Division Bench: Justice V. Kameswar Rao and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora.
Conqueror Innovations was represented by Senior Advocate C.M. Lall, Rahul Chaudhry, Nikhil Sharma, Sidharth Sharma, and Divesh Vashist.
Xiaomi Technology was represented by L. Badri Narayanan, with Prashant Phillips, Vindhya S. Mani, Pallasash Shankhdhar, Kartikay Singha, Ardra Goodwin, and Khushi Lokwani.