Troubled Taiwanese device maker HTC said that it has “filed urgent application to appeal” a UK court decision in a patent suit brought by Nokia, which includes an injunction against the sale of its One mini smartphone – although a block on sales of its flagship One device has been stayed.

HTC has until 6 December to appeal against the judge ruling to extend the stay to the One mini device.

But the court judgement also included some interesting details of HTC’s business in the UK. According to the documents, the UK is HTC’s largest European market, and One, One mini and One max account for around 70 per cent of sales there. The company sold around 715,000 devices in the UK from January to September 2013, with revenue of around £221 million.

As far as One is concerned, the documents reveal HTC had argued that an immediate injunction would be “catastrophic” for its UK business because One is its flagship model.

In the ruling, judge Mr Justice Arnold acknowledged that if the flagship One is removed from sale before the launch of its successor product, “I accept the damage which HTC will suffer…will be both considerable and very difficult to quantify”. However, he continued that “I do not accept that the damage which HTC will suffer if it is wrongly prevented from selling the One Mini pending appeal is as serious as in the case of One”.

The court said that with regard to One, the balance was in favour of staying an injunction, because “the potential harm to HTC outweighs that to Nokia, the One has been on the market for some time and the impact of HTC’s apparent lack of contingency planning is less significant”.

However, for One mini, the balance swings in favour of refusing the stay, because “the potential harm is more evenly weighted, but importantly the phone was launched much more recently and HTC designed and launched it at a time HTC knew it was facing a claim for infringement of the patent and apparently without making any contingency plans”.

The case also noted that HTC is “close to launching the successor flagship model to the HTC One”, which could take place in the first quarter of 2014 – one year after the launch of One. It is not clear if this device will also find itself infringing Nokia’s patents. Other products, including the 8S and Desire 601, also contain infringing chips.

Nokia contacted HTC about the infringement in 2011, giving it the option to either stop infringements or to take a short-term licence to enable HTC to ready a workaround, although neither option was taken. Nokia and HTC also have similar actions in the US and Germany.

The court documents noted that although it is more than 18 months since Nokia began its first action, “HTC’s evidence says very little about what, if anything, it has been doing to develop non-infringing alternatives during this period.”

The infringing technology involved is included in processors manufactured by Broadcom and Qualcomm, which are suppliers to HTC (among others). In the court ruling, judge Arnold wrote that HTC has known since October 2008 that Qualcomm customers were not licensed under Nokia’s patents without a separate licence, and “there is no evidence to suggest that HTC had any reason to believe that its position would be any better so far as Broadcom chips were concerned”.

The Finnish company took the action in the UK courts to defend intellectual property that had not been deemed standards essential – HTC does not have to support it in order to bring products to market. HTC already licences Nokia’s standards essential patents.

FOSS Patents noted that with intellectual property licensing set to become one of Nokia’s core activities following the sale of its Devices & Services unit to Microsoft, its ability to defend these value-added patents is very important – especially should it chose to assert them against other vendors.

Nokia’s patent is valid until October 2019, meaning that if an injunction was refused, HTC could continue to commit infringements for nearly six years, including future products and in “different technological and commercial circumstances”.

HTC said that in addition to other cases where Nokia has asserted its patents (namely against Apple and BlackBerry), Google/LG, Samsung and Sony are also marketing smart devices infringing the intellectual property involved.

Nokia and Samsung are currently engaged in arbitration related to patent licensing, which has not led to a deal. Nokia noted that with regard to the others, “its resources for patent enforcement are finite, and accordingly it needs to prioritise”.