Every time you connect to Wi-Fi, stream a film, or make a call on your smartphone, you are relying on decades of innovation, collaboration, and the complex patent licensing arrangements that allow modern technologies to function seamlessly. Technology companies that historically competed fiercely in the marketplace (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei), and others – have had to agree on common technical rules and guidelines that allow their devices to communicate with one another. These agreements become longstanding industry standards.

The technology underpinning those standards, however, was not given away for free. Much of it is protected by patent licensing, and this is where the legal and commercial tensions begin. As global licensing programs expand into new markets, these tensions are not confined to the jurisdictions where the original disputes play out.

What is FRAND?

FRAND is the acronym for fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory. It generally arises in antitrust cases where an owner of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) refuses to grant a license or refuses to grant a license on FRAND terms.

A patent that is indispensable to implementing an industry standard, such as 4G or 5G, is known as a Standard Essential Patent (SEP). Because there is no practical alternative to using the patented technology, SEP holders enjoy a unique form of market power. A manufacturer seeking to produce a standards compliant device often has no choice but to obtain a license.

To prevent SEP holders from exploiting this position, standard-setting organisations such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) require patent owners to license their SEPs on Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

The challenge, however, is that FRAND is a commitment without a predetermined price tag. Because no single number defines “fair” or “reasonable,” nearly every dispute ends up fighting over a different proxy for that missing price: what the rate should be, who is negotiating in good faith, whether a court should step in with an injunction, and which country’s court gets to decide. The four issues below are the recurring shapes this single underlying problem takes.

1.Determining the Royalty Rate

The first question is how much a license should cost. Courts and parties have generally relied on three approaches.

The comparable licenses approach examines what similarly situated companies have paid for comparable licenses. In practice, this method is often difficult because most licensing agreements remain confidential.

The top-down approach begins by estimating the total royalty burden that a particular standard can reasonably sustain before allocating a proportionate share to each Standard Essential Patent holder. The difficulty lies in determining the size of each party’s portfolio, particularly because the number of declared SEPs often far exceeds the number that are genuinely essential.

The incremental value approach seeks to identify the additional value contributed by the patented technology compared with the next-best alternative. While conceptually attractive, the exercise is often exceptionally difficult in practice.

2.The Question of Willingness

Another recurring question is the issue of willingness.

A willing licensee is an implementer that genuinely engages in licensing negotiations rather than using the process as a means of delay. Conversely, a willing licensor is a Standard Essential Patent holder that makes a transparent FRAND offer instead of opening negotiations with an excessive demand.

These labels carry significant legal consequences. They influence who bears the evidential burden, whether competition law concerns arise, and whether a party may ultimately seek injunctive relief.

3. Injunctions

The availability of injunctions in FRAND disputes remains one of the most contentious issues in this field.

In Huawei v ZTE (2015), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that a SEP holder risks abusing a dominant position if it seeks an injunction against a genuinely willing licensee. Before commencing such proceedings, the patent holder must notify the alleged infringer, make a proper FRAND offer, and allow the implementer, as a willing licensee, a reasonable opportunity to respond.

Germany illustrates how slowly this principle has taken hold even where the law has changed. In August 2021, the German Parliament amended its  Patent Act to require courts to weigh proportionality before granting an injunction, a response to years of criticism that German courts granted injunctions almost automatically once infringement was found. In practice, however, German courts have continued applying a strict test under which an injunction is rarely refused. The change has so far been more symbolic than transformative. Germany remains one of the most favorable jurisdictions in the world for Standard Essential Patent holders seeking injunctions.

The European Commission tried to address some of these same concerns through a different route: regulation rather than case law. Its 2023 proposal for a Regulation on Standard Essential Patents would have created a centralised “Competence Centre” within the EU Intellectual Property Office to register SEPs, run essentiality checks, and oversee a FRAND determination process that parties would generally have had to complete before taking a dispute to court. The European Parliament backed the plan in February 2024, but the Commission unexpectedly withdrew the proposal entirely in October 2025, after sustained pressure from SEP holders who argued it gave implementers too much leverage. The European Parliament was unhappy enough about the withdrawal that it is now suing the Commission at the EU Court of Justice, arguing the Commission had no right to pull the proposal. As things stand, there is no EU-wide SEP regulation in force or in progress — only a legal fight over whether there should be one.

4. Jurisdiction

Standard Essential Patents are national rights, but licensing negotiations are global. The UK Supreme Court resolved this tension dramatically in Unwired Planet v Huawei (2020), holding that an English court could set a global FRAND rate covering an entire international portfolio. China has responded with anti-suit injunction orders preventing parties from litigating abroad, creating a fragmented international landscape where parallel proceedings and contradictory rulings are increasingly common.

This fragmentation has a practical side effect, Standard Essential Patent holders increasingly file the same dispute in many countries at once, partly to maximise pressure and partly because no single court can resolve a truly global licensing dispute on its own. The recent campaign by Ericsson against the Chinese phone maker Transsion, discussed in detail below, is a clear current example, with parallel cases filed in Brazil, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Colombia, Morocco, and the Unified Patent Court within the space of about a month.

The Hold-Up and Hold-Out Problem

Underlying these disputes are two well-known commercial concerns.

Patent hold-up occurs when a SEP holder demands excessive royalties because implementers have little practical choice but to use the technology.

Patent hold-out, on the other hand, occurs when an implementer refuses to engage meaningfully in licensing discussions, hoping that legal uncertainty or prolonged litigation will delay payment.

The global dispute between Apple and Qualcomm, which ended in a multibillion-dollar settlement in 2019, is often cited as an example of both dynamics at once. Qualcomm was accused of using its dominant position in baseband chipsets to demand licensing terms that implementers felt they had no real ability to refuse, the classic hold-up complaint. At the same time, Apple withheld and redirected billions of dollars in royalty payments while litigating Qualcomm’s rates and practices across multiple jurisdictions, conduct that Qualcomm characterised as hold-out. The case shows how the same dispute can look like an abuse of market power from one side and a refusal to pay a fair price from the other, which is part of why FRAND disputes are difficult to resolve quickly.

Where Does Nigeria Stand?

For years, FRAND disputes were an alien concept in Nigeria – something you were far more likely to read about than to witness firsthand. That all changed on 14 November 2025, when Ericsson sued Transsion, the Chinese company behind the Tecno, Infinix, and Itel phone brands. Ericsson filed the same lawsuit against Transsion in Brazil and in India, plus seven more cases at a European patent court. By December, it had added Indonesia, Colombia, and Morocco too.

This is the first case of its kind reported in Nigeria. Transsion sells more smartphones in Nigeria than anyone else, taking a total of 63 percent of the market share. The disagreement between the two companies goes back almost ten years. Ericsson says it first contacted Transsion in 2017 to say Transsion was using its patents without paying for them. Transsion did not reply until 2018. The two companies signed an agreement to keep their talks confidential in 2021, and even after that, they still had not agreed on a license four years later. Ericsson’s own explanation is simple, it says Transsion never negotiated seriously. That is almost exactly the definition of hold-out mentioned earlier, the same pattern Apple was accused of in its dispute with Qualcomm. The matter is reported to be filed at the Federal High Court, though no hearing, ruling, or settlement has been reported.

Nigeria’s substantive  patent law dates back to 2004, long before anyone was writing rules for Standard Essential Patents, so it simply was not built to handle a case like this. Nigerian companies are predominantly consumers of global technology standards rather than contributors that own substantial Standard Essential Patent portfolios, which means the kinds of questions a FRAND case raises, who’s negotiating fairly, what counts as a reasonable price, whether the court should block sales, have never really been tested here before.

Nevertheless, the commercial implications of FRAND are already present in Nigeria. Telecommunications providers such as MTN Nigeria, Airtel Nigeria rely on infrastructure that incorporates technologies patented by companies including Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei. The licensing arrangements may be negotiated outside Nigeria, often at the parent-company level, but the economic effects inevitably filter into the Nigerian market through the cost of devices and telecommunications services.

Nigeria does have a few reforms in progress, though none of them were designed with FRAND dispute in mind, though it is worth being clear about their limits. The most significant is the National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS), approved by the Federal Government in 2025, which aims to modernise how Nigeria registers and manages patents, trademarks, and other IP rights. Alongside it is the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS 2020-2030), a broader ten-year roadmap for digital growth. None of these reforms were built to solve FRAND disputes specifically, and none of them should be mistaken for that. But they do point in a generally useful direction, faster patent processing, and better teamwork between the people who register patents, the people who enforce competition rules, and the courts. With a real Standard Essential Patent case now apparently working its way through the system, that kind of groundwork is no longer something Nigeria can put off until later.

FRAND disputes occupy a complex intersection between intellectual property, competition law, and global commercial strategy. They raise difficult questions about market power, innovation, and access to technology.

For Nigeria, these questions are no longer confined to foreign courts. With Ericsson v Transsion reportedly before a Nigerian court, the legal and commercial conversation this article describes has, in a real sense, already arrived.

References

Legislation

1. Patents and Designs Act, Cap P2, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004.
2. ETSI, ETSI Guide on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) (ETSI 2021) https://www.etsi.org/images/files/IPR/etsi-guide-on-ipr.pdf accessed 21 June 2026.

Cases

3. Huawei Technologies Co Ltd v ZTE Corp (Case C-170/13) [2015] EU:C:2015:477.
4. Unwired Planet International Ltd v Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [2020] UKSC 37.
5. Apple Inc v Qualcomm Inc (United States District Court, Southern District of California, settlement announced 16 April 2019).

Journal Articles

6. JG Sidak, ‘The Meaning of FRAND, Part I: Royalties’ (2013) 9(4) Journal of Competition Law & Economics 931.
7. MA Lemley and C Shapiro, ‘A Simple Approach to Setting Reasonable Royalties for Standard Essential Patents’ (2013) 28 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1135.

Institutional/Organisational Reports

8. World Intellectual Property Organisation, IP in Africa: Trends and Challenges (WIPO 2022) https://www.wipo.int accessed 21 June 2026.
9. European Commission, ‘Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Standard Essential Patents and Amending Regulation (EU) 2017/1001’ COM(2023) 232 final.

Online News Articles

10. ‘Nigeria Posts Fastest Smartphone Market Growth Since Q1 2024’ TechCabal (5 September 2025) https://techcabal.com/2025/09/05/nigeria-smartphone-market-recovery-q2-2025/ accessed 21 June 2026.
11. ‘Ericsson Sues Tecno, Infinix Maker Transsion in Four Countries, Including Nigeria’ Pluboard (14 November 2025) https://pluboard.com/2025/11/14/technology/ericsson-sues-transsion-tecno-infinix-patent-case-nigeria accessed 21 June 2026.
12. C Schulze, ‘Ericsson Sues Transsion with Taylor Wessing and Kather Augenstein’ JUVE Patent (17 November 2025) https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/ericsson-sues-transsion-with-taylor-wessing-and-kather-augenstein accessed 21 June 2026.
13. BRELA Research in Economics and Legal Analytics, ‘Ericsson v Transsion: SEP Litigation Reaches Morocco’ (BRELA, 8 May 2026) https://brela-research.com/articles accessed 21 June 2026.
14. ‘Examining Nigerian Courts’ Patent Practice in View of Ericsson v Transsion Suit’ IAM https://www.iam-media.com/article/examining-nigerian-courts-patent-practice-in-view-of-ericsson-v-transsion-suit accessed 21 June 2026