華為與摩托羅拉達(dá)成和解 Huawei declares tuce with Motorola

Huawei and Motorola have settled their intellectual property disputes, freeing the Chinese telecoms company from damaging US litigation and paving the way for Nokia Siemens Networks’ proposed acquisition of Motorola’s wireless assets.

Huawei Technologies and Motorola Solutions said in a joint statement on Wednesday they had agreed to drop pending lawsuits against each other.

Huawei expressed hope that the deal would “clear up certain misconceptions” in the US about the company, whose founder was formerly an officer in the People’s Liberation Army.

Separately, Motorola Solutions reduced the price NSN will pay for its network infrastructure unit from $1.2bn to $975m. The deal will close on April 29.

Motorola believes that with the lawsuits now settled, Chinese regulators will approve the sale of its mobile network business to NSN.

When Motorola put the unit up for sale last year, Huawei had also vied for it. But Motorola announced it had chosen to sell to NSN instead and named Huawei as a defendant in a trade secrets lawsuit.

The US company accused Lemko, a start-up whose staff included several former Motorola employees, and Huawei of conspiring to steal trade secrets. At the time, Huawei was struggling to win big network contracts in the North American market, where it had also been sued by Cisco for allegedly copying the router company’s technology. Cisco and Huawei settled in 2004.

In January this year, Huawei won a Chicago court order to stop Motorola transferring certain intellectual property to NSN that had been developed in co-operation with Huawei.

The Motorola-NSN deal was simultaneously delayed by a prolonged antitrust review by China’s commerce ministry. The regulator’s decision is due early next month.

Motorola agreed to withdraw its claims and dismiss Huawei as a defendant in the trade secrets case. Huawei, in turn, said it would drop its lawsuit against Motorola and NSN in exchange for an agreement under which the Huawei technology is transferred to NSN for a fee.

“Huawei had filed objections to the Ministry of Commerce, and it has already withdrawn its objections,” said Robert Haslam, a partner at Covington and Burling, which advised Huawei. “If their objections were the only ones, nothing should stand in the way [of the acquisition].”

Motorola expressed confidence that the deal would now receive Chinese government approval in time to be completed by the end of the month. Once NSN takes over Motorola’s network infrastructure assets, it will overtake Huawei as the world’s second- largest telecoms network gear vendor after Ericsson.