Meizu is one of the fastest-growing smartphone manufacturers in China at the moment. This company had managed to sell 20 million smartphones last year, which actually means their sales grew approximately 350% YoY. Such numbers are quite staggering, and the company is actually planning to sell even more devices before the end of this year, they’re aiming to sell around 25 million units, which seems quite modest considering the current growth rate.
That being said, Meizu has encountered a number of obstacles on the way, including a couple of lawsuits. The company was sued back in 2012 when they released their first smartphone, the Meizu MX. Back then, Apple sued Meizu, and claimed that the company has ripped off the original iPhone, but that was not the only lawsuit Meizu had to deal with. Last year, the company was sued by ZTE a couple of years ago as well, because Meizu’s phones used to feature the ‘Halo’ button which resembled ZTE’s signature capacitive key. Since then, Meizu has been including the physical home keys on their devices, the multi-functional ‘mBack’ keys, to be exact. Those keys actually serve as both a capacitive back key, and a home physical key, while on some devices you also get a fingerprint scanner built in. ZTE did win the lawsuit against Meizu, but that really did not stop this company from growing. Since then, Meizu has managed to grow quite a bit, and it actually makes things really interesting, mainly because they’re a direct competitor to Xiaomi, their devices are really well built, quite powerful, very affordable, and even though it still needs some work, the software is really good as well.
So, one would think Meizu is in the clear, no more lawsuits, right? Well, wrong, Qualcomm just filed a lawsuit against Meizu. The US-based company has sued Meizu because of an alleged patent infringement. Qualcomm claims that Meizu’s MediaTek-powered smartphones are in violation of their 3G and 4G patents. Meizu has actually been avoiding using Qualcomm’s chips because of royalties, but it seems like Qualcomm found a reason to sue the company after all. As a side note, Meizu has been using both MediaTek and Exynos-powered chips in their smartphones. It remains to be seen what will come of this, we’ll let you know if any additional info pops up, stay tuned.
UPDATE: Meizu has released an official statement regarding this situation, the company said the following: “Meizu has worked with Qualcomm to advance towards an agreement. We respect Qualcomm’s right to use legal measures if they are unsatisfied with the progress, but still welcome them to proceed the negotiations with us at any time”. We will make sure to keep you updated if new info surfaces.