HMD stops selling its smartphones in Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands after Fraunhofer’s UPC injunctions

Context: A couple of weeks ago, the UPC’s Hamburg Local Division (LD) granted German research institute Fraunhofer a pair of Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) patent injunctions against mobile device maker HMD (August 25, 2026 ip fray article).

What’s new & direct impact:

• There’s every indication that HMD is already obeying those injunctions. In light of the recent decisions, we performed an online store check, and found that HMD is offering only feature phones, but no longer smartphones, on its websites for German, French, Italian, and Dutch customers. The injunctions in question covered those four countries plus Belgium, a country for which HMD does not operate an online store. The overlap between the countries in which HMD removed the entire smartphone category from its web offerings and the recent UPC injunctions leaves no room for any other plausible explanation: HMD is complying, and compliance in this case has the effect of a sales ban. The AAC standard is required by Android’s specification.
• Presumably HMD will seek an enforcement stay from the UPC Court of Appeal (CoA), but the hurdle for that is very high. Failing such a motion, it appears rather likely that HMD will sign up to Via’s AAC pool, an extremely popular pool with almost 1,000 licensees, among them pretty much every significant mobile device maker.

Wider ramifications: HMD has been slapped with patent injunctions on various prior occasions. In particular, VoiceAge EVS won every single case it brought against HMD over the Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) standard. But HMD somehow kept selling smartphones in Germany. Now the Fraunhofer AAC injunctions apparently have the effect of a removal of an entire product category from HMD’s web shops. It’s likely that HMD has far greater margins on its smartphones than its feature phones (i.e., basic phones that are just good enough for phone calls and SMS text messages).