CRA Vice President Dr. Fei Deng served as OPPO’s economic expert in a litigation in China brought by Advanced Codec Technologies (ACT) against OPPO. In a judgment issued publicly by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of China in December 2023, the SPC for the first time determined the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rate for a set of standard essential patents (SEPs). As such, the judgment provides important guidance for future SEP litigation in China.
ACT initiated the litigation against OPPO in November 2018 in the Nanjing Intermediate Court, claiming OPPO infringed six of ACT’s Chinese patents essential to the Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) standard, a speech audio coding standard used by mobile phones. ACT sought an injunction and damages of USD 50 million. After the first-instance court issued a judgment in November 2021, the parties appealed the case to the SPC. On December 12, 2023, the SPC issued a final judgment, determining the FRAND royalties for the six litigated patents to be USD 2.2 million (RMB 15.4 million) based on a comparable license that ACT had previously signed with another implementer.
As OPPO’s economic expert, Dr. Deng submitted several reports to the courts, analyzing the comparability of various licenses proposed by ACT and calculating the FRAND royalties applicable to OPPO. Dr. Deng’s analysis played a key role in assisting OPPO to persuade the SPC to award FRAND royalties well below the amount claimed by ACT.
The CRA team supporting Dr. Deng’s work in this matter are listed below. To learn more about CRA’s China competition capabilities, click here.
