Samsung got into a battle that it lost in the first round, and there’s a risk the company will no longer be allowed to sell 61 models of its smartphones in Russia. Russian courts have ruled that Samsung will have to stop selling any and all of its devices that have Samsung Pay, since it infringes a Sqwin Sa.’s – a Swiss-based mobile payments company – patents.
According to a patent infringement related to the Samsung Pay Service (via GSMArena), Samsung could soon be banned from selling its devices in Russia, including the high-end foldable flagships, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3, and Galaxy Z Fold 3.
As expected, Samsung has appealed the court’s decision, and it’s not yet legally binned to halt any sales of its devices, which could be catastrophic for the South Korean giant. According to Statista, Samsung is the second-largest smartphone vendor in Russia with over 28.3% of market share, in Q2 2021, which means that losing its position would give Apple (3rd) and Xiaomi (1st with 32.8% market share) a chance to grow even bigger, and make the Samsung slice smaller.
The problem was first introduced back in 2013, when Victor Gulchenko filed for a patent that described a transaction system, which was then registered in April 2019, and granted to the Swiss-based Sqwin Sa company. For reference, Samsung introduced Samsung Pay way back in 2015, and it was introduced to the Russian market a year later in 2016.
Samsung Pay is one of the most used services in Russia, and its the third most used contactless payment system with 17% of all transitions, whereas Apple Pay takes 30%, and Google Pay takes 32%. According to legal experts, the other two services may also fall victim to Sqwin Sa’s patent, and there may be a lot more legal challenges to come. It remains to be seen what’ll be the end of all this.
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