The Delhi High Court has directed Shenzhen Transsion Holdings, the Chinese smartphone maker behind the Itel, Infinix, and Tecno brands, to deposit one-fifth of the cumulative value of its last counteroffer with the Registrar General within eight weeks. According to reports from Livelaw, Justice Tushar Rao Gedela passed this order on 1 July 2026 while deciding InterDigital's applications seeking an interim pro tem security deposit pending the court's decision on its plea for an interim injunction.
InterDigital has filed two separate lawsuits against Shenzhen and its affiliated companies, asserting infringement of five patents. As reported by Livelaw, four of these patents relate to cellular communication technologies incorporated in 3G, 4G and 5G standards, while the fifth covers HEVC video coding technology. The company alleged that Shenzhen has been using its SEPs without obtaining a licence since at least April 2016, despite licensing discussions that began in 2019.
According to InterDigital, it provided Shenzhen with more than 100 claim charts during negotiations and held at least 12 meetings with the company, including four full-day technical discussions in China. The company also proposed resolving the licensing dispute through arbitration, but claimed Shenzhen rejected the proposal and continued to use the patented technologies without securing a licence. Shenzhen opposed the security deposit request, arguing that InterDigital had failed to establish the validity and essentiality of the patents on a prima facie basis.
The High Court rejected Shenzhen's argument, relying on previous Division Bench rulings that held the absence of comparable licensing agreements at this stage did not prevent the court from granting interim relief. As reported by Livelaw, the court reviewed decisions from foreign jurisdictions concerning corresponding patents and observed that while Chinese authorities had invalidated counterparts of some of the asserted patents, courts in jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and Brazil had upheld the validity or essentiality of corresponding patents. The court concluded that there was no reason at this preliminary stage to conclude that the patents asserted by InterDigital were either invalid or non-essential.
Since comparable third-party licensing agreements were not available on the record, the court treated Shenzhen's final counteroffer during licensing negotiations as the most appropriate benchmark for calculating the security amount. According to Livelaw, the court allowed the company to submit an unconditional bank guarantee for an equivalent amount instead of making the cash deposit. The court clarified that the observations in the order are limited to deciding the present applications for pro tem security and will not affect the pending proceedings concerning InterDigital's plea for an interim injunction.
