Huawei wins injunction against NSN-Moto deal

Huawei has won a restraining order against Motorola preventing it from sharing any confidential information about Huawei’s technology with Motorola Networks’ perspective buyer, Nokia Siemens Networks.

Huawei sued Motorola and NSN in U.S. District Court this week, attempting to block the transfer of the GSM portion of Moto’s commercial networks business to its Huawei’s European competitor.

At issue is an old joint venture between Huawei and Motorola, which we first reported on in 2006, when Motorola began to sell Huawei UMTS and high-speed packet access (HSPA) gear under the Motorola name.

Motorola effectively ended its own UMTS development at the time, leaving only the GSM, CDMA and WiMax businesses to NSN when it came knocking with a $1.2 billion offer this summer.

But Moto’s GSM and Huawei’s UMTS arms are closely tied together due to the joint venture, which was aimed at selling HSPA networks to Moto’s GSM installed base. Huawei has claimed in its lawsuit that Moto hasn’t provided adequate assurances that Moto won’t be handing over Huawei’s intellectual property and confidential information to NSN during the transfer of assets.

In arguments before U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Coleman, attorneys for NSN and Motorola warned that the injunction could scuttle the deal between the two vendors entirely, but Coleman went ahead with the court order, giving Motorola 24 hours to notify her once the deal gets clearance from Chinese regulators.