Recently, a small company registered in Budapest, Hungary, issued a short joint statement with China’s lithium-battery giant Sunwoda. The two sides signed a patent licensing agreement and withdrew all pending litigation in Germany, China, and South Korea. A cross-border patent war that had lasted nearly two years was brought to an end.

On the surface, it looked like just another routine commercial settlement. But if you place it on the grand chessboard of global new-energy competition, you’ll find it is anything but simple.

The “patent pool”—a system originally designed to promote technology sharing—is, in certain contexts, being distorted, shifting from a tool for collaboration into a weapon for competition. More importantly, Chinese companies are the ones being hit by this round of rules; and what role they will play in the next round is far more complicated than conventional wisdom suggests.

A Cross-Border Patent War Driven by a Battery Licensing Agent

To understand the weight of this settlement, you first need to know who the opponent really was.

The plaintiff was called Tulip Innovation Kft. The name sounds like an innovative tech company, but in reality it does not conduct R&D, manufacture, or sell any battery products. It has only two functions: licensing patents globally, and filing infringement lawsuits.

Behind Tulip stand two true giants: LG Energy Solution and Panasonic Energy. The two companies bundled and injected into Tulip more than 5,000 core lithium-battery patents, spanning the entire technology chain—cathode and anode materials, electrolytes, separators, electrodes, cells, modules, packs, and more. Then this “Patent Assertion Entity (PAE)” stepped forward to do, on the giants’ behalf, the things they’d rather not be seen doing themselves.

In October 2024, relying on a patent known as EP141, Tulip accused Sunwoda in Germany of infringing its separator-coating and electrode-assembly technologies in prismatic batteries. Soon after, the fight quickly spread to South Korea: Tulip filed a complaint with the Korea Trade Commission, alleging that Sunwoda’s battery cells and the corresponding battery packs supplied for Geely vehicles infringed South Korean patents—attempting to force compliance from Chinese companies through coordinated, multi-jurisdiction pressure.

This playbook is hardly unfamiliar to the industry. It evokes the once highly controversial NPE (non-practicing entity) model in the telecom sector—entities that make no products of their own, but profit by acquiring or holding patents and suing others. The difference is that when the NPE model is grafted onto the new-energy industry—where technology routes iterate at breakneck speed, patent validity can be uncertain, and judicial environments vary widely across countries—its destructive power and the controversy it generates are multiplied.

German Court Ruling Shakes the Foundation of the Battery Pool

Sunwoda did not choose to take the hits passively or pay money just to make the trouble go away. Instead, it went on the offensive.

While defending the lawsuit, Sunwoda simultaneously filed an invalidation action against European Patent No. 2528141 (“EP141”) with the German Federal Patent Court. On May 19, 2026, following an oral hearing, the court rendered its judgment in open court, holding that the EP141 patent was entirely invalid in Germany.

What did this mean? The legal foundation Tulip relied on to bring its infringement suit was directly shaken in a key market.

This ruling has been widely viewed within the industry as a landmark event—signaling that Chinese lithium-battery companies have broken through overseas patent barriers—not merely because Sunwoda won. More importantly, it tore open a carefully packaged “patent barrier” and exposed that, within certain “patent pool platforms,” the real robustness of the patents can be far lower than what is claimed publicly.

In the end, both sides still chose to settle. Sunwoda obtained a legitimate license to use the LG Energy Solution and Panasonic patent pool, clearing obstacles to its expansion in the European market. But the settlement leaves a thought-provoking question: when a court has already found the core patent invalid, is a license concluded under that premise a reflection of technological value—or a compromise in a commercial power game?

The answer to that question is precisely the key entry point for understanding the entire phenomenon of new-energy patent pools.

One Label, Three Ecosystems: The Fundamental Differences Among Three Types of Patent Pools

To understand the controversy surrounding platforms like Tulip, we first need to clarify one concept: not everything called a “patent pool” is the same kind of thing. Broadly speaking, today’s mainstream global patent-pool operating models fall into three categories. Their names may sound similar, but their underlying logic—and their compliance risks—are entirely different.

The first category is the traditional standard-essential patent (SEP) pool. Represented by Access Advance, MPEG LA, and Via Licensing, these pools are built on standard-essential patents and, over decades of development, have formed a relatively mature compliance framework. Their core system rests on four pillars: patents admitted to the pool must be assessed for essentiality by an independent third party, to prevent “ringers” from slipping in; rights holders must commit to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms; licensing outside the pool is permitted to preserve market competition; and day-to-day operations are handled by an independent third-party organization that keeps its distance from patent owners. This type of patent pool has a solid compliance foundation—standards, evaluations, rules, and independent operation.

The second category is the industry-led joint patent pool. It is initiated jointly by operating companies within an industry—classic examples include the early DVD patent pool and the photovoltaic patent pool currently being advanced in China. Such pools do not necessarily rest on formal standards; their core aim is to reduce wasteful infighting within the sector and lower transaction costs. Whether they are compliant depends on three key factors: whether the patents in the pool are complementary rather than substitutive, whether independent licensing outside the pool is allowed, and whether there is joint price-setting and market allocation. If run properly, they can address the “patent thicket” problem; but if controlled by a small number of dominant players, they may also devolve into a tool for entrenching those players’ market positions.

The third category is the offensive patent monetization platform represented by Tulip. A handful of giants bundle their own patents, set up a dedicated operating entity, and use litigation as the primary means to drive licensing monetization. Although these entities call themselves patent pools, they differ fundamentally from the first two types: their patents come entirely from the parent company, and the pool is not open for third parties to contribute patents; the patents involved lack an objective assessment of essentiality; licensing negotiations often treat lawsuits as a prerequisite, using the threat of injunctions to force compliance; and royalty rates and terms are not disclosed, making any discussion of FRAND principles impossible.

With the same institutional design, the line between proper use and abuse is often no more than a layer of governance rules.

Three Compliance Minefields for New-Energy Patent Pools

What warrants vigilance is that Tulip will by no means be an isolated case. In recent years, various patent pools have sprung up across new-energy fields such as lithium batteries and photovoltaics. Their names may sound impressive, but on the compliance front they carry three structural risks.

The first minefield: “bundled sales” through packaging non-essential patents. The core premise of a standard-essential patent pool is “essentiality”—without that patent, the standard cannot be implemented. But in the new-energy sector, the vast majority of patents are non-standard-essential, and technical solutions often have multiple alternative routes. Packaging large numbers of non-essential patents into a one-stop license is, in essence, bundled sales. The Anti-Monopoly Guidelines of the Anti-Monopoly Commission of the State Council on the Field of Intellectual Property Rights has long made clear that, in exercising intellectual property rights, business operators may not, without justified reasons, tie in the sale of products. Licensees, in order to obtain a small number of core patents, are forced to pay for a large number of useless ones—precisely the classic scenario targeted by antitrust enforcement.

The second minefield: the “Schrödinger-style” validity of patents. New-energy technologies iterate far faster than communications standards, and many patents are filed while technical pathways are evolving rapidly—meaning their robustness has not been fully tested in court. Tulip’s EP141 being invalidated in its entirety in Germany was not an isolated case. In photovoltaics, Trina Solar had already had two U.S. patents invalidated, and JA Solar also had one European patent revoked. More subtly, many patent disputes ultimately end in settlement; the parties often jointly request termination of invalidation proceedings, leaving a patent’s validity in a perpetual “Schrödinger state”—neither disproven nor confirmed. Patent pools can then keep their value narrative alive, while licensees shoulder all the legal risk.

The third minefield: suspicions of a “price alliance” among leading players. When direct competitors in the same track jointly form a patent pool and offer unified external licensing, they may be skirting the red line for horizontal monopoly agreements. Once a patent pool becomes a vehicle for coordinating licensing policies, standardizing royalty rates, and carving up markets, it is no longer a technology-sharing platform—it becomes a price cartel. Regulators have already taken note of this risk. The Guidelines on the Establishment and Operation of Patent Pools issued in 2025 specifically stressed that patent-pool operations must strictly comply with anti-monopoly laws and regulations, and it encouraged operators to proactively report to anti-monopoly enforcement agencies in advance. In 2024, the State Administration for Market Regulation also issued an antitrust reminder/admonition letter regarding the Avanci 4G Vehicle licensing program. The signal is clear: regardless of what label it wears, a patent pool should not become a safe harbor for evading antitrust scrutiny.

The Domestic Market: A Compliance Stress Test for China's First PV Patent Pool

Turning our gaze back from overseas, an incident that occurred around the same time has turned the above concerns into an immediate exam question.

On April 21, 2026, China’s first patent pool in the photovoltaic industry—jointly initiated by three leading PV companies, Trina Solar, JinkoSolar, and JA Solar—was officially launched under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). The first batch included 54 patents related to TOPCon cells and modules, and an expert steering committee was established at the same time to oversee compliance.

In recent years, patent litigation in the PV industry had barely let up—from Hanwha suing LONGi, Trina, and Jinko in multiple jurisdictions across Europe and the U.S., to Jinko suing LONGi, to JA Solar suing Chint, and Maxeon suing Aiko. Most disputes ultimately ended in settlement and licensing. Since the endgame is licensing anyway, integrating resources through a patent pool and presenting a unified licensing front does have practical logic. Together, the three companies hold several thousand granted invention patents, with annual maintenance fees running into the millions of yuan; monetizing patent value through a pool is also a normal commercial objective.

But what deserves even closer attention is not that original intent—it is the compliance test.

First is the limitation of the technology path itself. The current patent pool focuses only on the TOPCon route, while BC, perovskite, and other technology routes each have their own independent patent systems. A TOPCon patent pool is inherently camp-based by nature—whether it will further raise barriers between routes or instead drive progress across the industry as a whole remains to be seen. Second is patent quality and coverage: the first batch includes only 54 patents, and whether they can cover all key technical points of mainstream products—and whether they can withstand invalidation proceedings—will directly determine their real-world value.

The thorniest issue, however, is governance. Patent pools that the industry widely recognizes as compliant are largely concentrated in the information sector, serving communications standards and video codec standards that demand extremely high compatibility; in antitrust compliance, they already have mature, internationally aligned practices. By contrast, in the new energy sector there are neither international standards to follow nor any clearly benchmarked evaluation in sight.

What is especially worth noting is that some of the patents included in this pool were acquired by three PV companies from South Korea’s LG Electronics. After the acquisition, these patents were quickly used to pursue peers for massive damages—for instance, Trina Solar’s lawsuit against Canadian Solar seeking RMB 1 billion is still under trial to this day. Now that the three companies have established the industry’s first patent pool, the first hurdle it faces is whether it could be suspected of tie-in sales. And since the three companies are direct competitors, how can it be ensured that the patent pool will not become a tool to entrench their market positions and squeeze smaller and mid-sized players? How can fee rates be kept fair, rather than a unified price negotiated among the three? How can an independent patent evaluation and dispute-resolution mechanism be put in place to avoid the “player and referee” problem?

The three companies’ acquisition of patents, the building of a patent pool, and the plan to aggregate all TOPCon patent resources—this whole chain of actions carries each company’s own commercial and strategic objectives. But a patent pool’s success has never hinged on how many patents it contains; it depends on operational neutrality, transparent rules, and rigorous compliance.

A Patent Pool Should Foster Innovation, Not Erect a New Siege

From lithium batteries to photovoltaics, China’s new energy companies are going through a pivotal shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China.” Patents evolving from defensive tools into operating assets is an inevitable trend. As an advanced form of consolidated IP commercialization, a patent pool is, in itself, a neutral tool: used well, it can reduce transaction costs and speed up technology diffusion; used poorly, it can devolve into a weapon for leading players to lock in advantages, strike competitors, and charge “tolls.”

The settlement between Sunwoda and Tulip was a wake-up call for China’s industrial community. On the one hand, Chinese companies must take overseas patent strategy seriously, and have the courage to challenge patent validity on the international judicial stage rather than simply paying to make problems go away. On the other hand, when building their own patent pools, they must learn from the lessons of the overseas NPE model, hold the line on compliance, and never turn the tactics others once used to box us in into yet another tool that fuels destructive internal competition across the industry.

The ultimate purpose of a patent pool is to energize innovation, not to erect new barriers; to reduce the cost of using technology across society, not to raise the threshold for entering an industry. Only when it operates within a compliant framework can a patent pool truly become a catalyst for industrial upgrading.

This may well be the most valuable lesson the Sunwoda settlement has left for China’s industrial community.

(Text | Laoma Business Review, Author | Andy, Editor | Ma Jinnan; this article was first published on the TMTPost App)