The Delhi High Court has directed Shenzhen Transsion Holdings, the Chinese electronics group behind the itel, Infinix and Tecno smartphone brands, to deposit pro tem security with the Registrar General while it fights InterDigital Patent Holdings over a set of standard essential patents covering cellular and video coding technology. Justice Tushar Rao Gedela passed the order on the first of July, and at roughly a hundred pages it stands as the longest pro tem order this court has produced so far in a line of cases stretching back several years. The length is not incidental, the order works through validity, essentiality, infringement, the financial condition of the implementer and the method of quantifying the deposit, and along the way it shifts the ground on more than one of those questions in ways that will matter well beyond this particular dispute.
The dispute and what InterDigital was asking for
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InterDigital, an American research and development company with a large portfolio of patents covering wireless and video communication standards, filed two suits against Transsion relying on five patents. Four of these cover cellular technology essential to the operation of 3G, 4G and 5G networks, and the fifth concerns HEVC video coding. InterDigital’s case was that Transsion had been using these patents without a licence since as early as April 2016, and that correspondence between the parties beginning in 2019 had run through several rounds of counter offers without producing a concluded FRAND licence. Rather than seek an interim injunction outright, which would have required the court to form a firmer view on infringement at this early stage, InterDigital asked for a pro tem security deposit, an ad interim remedy the Delhi High Court has been developing since its first SEP rulings in 2018 and which requires only a preliminary assessment of whether the underlying patents are valid and essential, not whether they have actually been infringed.
Transsion resisted the application on several fronts. It argued that InterDigital had not shown the essentiality or validity of the suit patents on even a prima facie basis, that no security could be fairly valued without third party licence agreements being placed on record, and that its own robust financial position meant there was no urgency requiring a deposit before trial. It also pointed to foreign proceedings, including invalidation findings against comparable patents in China, to argue that InterDigital’s portfolio was not as secure as it claimed.
How the court treated validity and essentiality
Justice Gedela rejected Transsion’s objections and found that InterDigital had established a prima facie case on both validity and essentiality. The reasoning leaned heavily on evidence built up outside India, foreign court decisions from the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil upholding counterpart patents, declarations lodged with international standard setting bodies, and claim chart mapping supported by independent test reports. On the Chinese invalidation Transsion relied on, the court took what amounts to a numbers based approach, holding that one adverse finding in one jurisdiction could not outweigh validations reached in several others, and that looked at across the board the global picture supported InterDigital’s position even if no single foreign ruling could be treated as conclusive in India. The court also drew on its own earlier pro tem order in InterDigital’s related dispute with Oppo, where some of the same patents had already survived a similar scrutiny, using that consistency as further support.
More significant than the outcome is what the court declined to examine. It held explicitly that infringement itself, as opposed to validity and essentiality, cannot be assessed in the same summary manner at the pro tem stage, and in doing so it stepped back from an approach that earlier orders had used to justify security deposits under an exception built into the High Court’s own 2022 Patent Suit Rules for cases showing infringement on a prima facie basis. By taking infringement off the table entirely at this stage, the court effectively lowered the bar SEP holders need to clear to obtain a pro tem deposit, since they no longer need to make even a preliminary showing that the implementer’s specific products actually practise the patented standard, a mapping exercise that ordinarily unfolds in two stages, first tying the patent claims to the declared standard and then tying the defendant’s products to that same standard.
Financial health stops being a real obstacle
Earlier pro tem orders in this line of cases treated the implementer’s financial condition as a meaningful factor, with a precarious balance sheet or a lack of assets within India cited as grounds for requiring security to guard against the risk that any eventual damages award would go unpaid. Transsion argued the opposite, that its financial position was strong enough that no such protective measure was needed. The court turned this argument on its head, reasoning that a financially healthy implementer should have no difficulty making the deposit, and that the very absence of financial strain removed any hardship objection Transsion might otherwise have raised. Read together with the earlier line of cases where weak finances justified a deposit, the practical effect is that financial condition now points toward ordering a deposit whichever way it cuts, a shift that meaningfully changes the calculus for future respondents hoping to resist security on economic grounds.
Quantifying the deposit without a third party licence on record
On the mechanics of calculating the amount, the court held that Transsion could not insist on disclosure of InterDigital’s existing licence agreements with other implementers as a precondition to fixing a fair rate, following its own earlier rulings in the Nokia and Dolby line of cases that such disclosure is not mandatory for pro tem purposes. Faced with an incomplete picture, neither party’s actual sales data nor comparable licences on the table, the court settled on a familiar formula from earlier orders in this jurisprudence, ordering Transsion to deposit one fifth of the cumulative value of its own most recent counter offer to InterDigital, calculated over the licence period InterDigital had sought, within eight weeks, with the alternative of furnishing an unconditional bank guarantee for the same amount. The court also rejected Transsion’s suggestion that any security should be calculated by reference to Indian patents alone, holding that cellular standards are too interconnected across jurisdictions to be carved up that way for valuation purposes.
Part of a much larger campaign
This dispute sits inside a considerably wider pattern of enforcement against Transsion. InterDigital has pursued the company not only in Delhi but also before the Unified Patent Court and in Brazil over the same family of cellular and video coding patents, treating India as one venue among several in a coordinated global strategy. Transsion has faced comparable SEP campaigns from other major licensors as well, with LG Electronics filing its own suit in India and Ericsson having run an even larger multi country campaign spanning Brazil, Nigeria, the UPC and India before settling its dispute with Transsion through a cross licence in early July, shortly after this order was passed. Seen against that backdrop, the Delhi High Court’s willingness to grant security on favourable terms for InterDigital adds weight to India’s standing as a venue SEP holders now treat as a serious part of their global enforcement toolkit, alongside the UPC and Brazil, rather than as an afterthought.
Where this fits in the pro tem lineage
Pro tem security as a distinct remedy has grown up gradually in Delhi rather than arriving fully formed in a single ruling. It traces back to the court’s Nokia dispute with Oppo in 2022, developed further through the Philips litigation against Rajesh Bansal and later Bhagirathi Electronics, and picked up pace through a string of orders against Xiaomi, Lava and now Transsion, with the InterDigital dispute against Oppo feeding directly into the present case since several of the same patents had already cleared a similar prima facie hurdle there. Each order in that sequence has tended to nudge the boundaries of the doctrine a little further, sometimes toward the implementer and sometimes toward the SEP holder, and commentators tracking the pattern have noted that the method for actually calculating the deposit amount remains the least settled part of the entire framework even as the surrounding principles firm up. The one fifth of counter offer formula used here traces back through earlier rulings rather than resting on any explained methodology of its own, which leaves the quantification exercise looking more like an accumulated custom than a reasoned calculation, a gap the court itself effectively acknowledged by describing pro tem directions as incapable of being reduced to any fixed formula while still reaching for the same fraction used in past cases.
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Conclusion
I read this order as continuing a trend that has been building in Delhi’s SEP jurisprudence for a while now, where the threshold for obtaining pro tem security keeps drifting lower with each new ruling even as the court insists, correctly, that no single formula governs every case. Taking infringement off the table at this stage makes practical sense given how fact intensive that enquiry genuinely is, and it spares the court from prejudging a question better left to trial, but it does mean implementers now face security obligations on a thinner evidentiary showing than before. The treatment of Transsion’s financial strength as a reason to order a deposit rather than a reason to decline one strikes me as the more debatable move in the judgment, since it leaves an implementer with essentially no financial argument against security regardless of which way its balance sheet actually looks. For SEP holders running global campaigns of this kind, the message from Delhi is unmistakably favourable, and I expect InterDigital’s win here to be cited by other licensors chasing security deposits from implementers doing business in India well before their disputes reach a final hearing.
Case: InterDigital Patent Holdings Inc. & Anr. v. Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co. Ltd. & Ors., Delhi High Court, pro tem security order dated 1st July 2026.
