On March 4 this year, GENERAL PROTECHT Jiangsu Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "GP") v. Bull Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Bull") patent infringement dispute case was heard in Nanjing Intermediate People's Court. The amount of compensation claimed by GP was nearly 1 billion RMB, which raised widespread concern in the public. It is generally believed that it might bring certain influence to the IPO of Bull. Nonetheless, there were six companies listed on November 21, and the Bull Group appeared among them. According to Bull, GP's lawsuit against Bull’s patent infringement has been withdrawn or rejected, which may mean that the IPO of Bull shall not be affected by the patent lawsuit.

As the prospectus of Bull revealed, GP filed a lawsuit with Nanjing Central Jincheng Warehousing Supermarket Co., Ltd. (defendant I) and Bull (defendant II) to Nanjing Intermediate People's Court in December 2018. The lawsuit involved two patents (ZL201010297882.4 and ZL201020681902.3), which involved 10 patent litigation cases, a compensation of 99.9 million RMB was proposed for each case respectively. On July 23, 2019, The Patent Office of the State Intellectual Property Office, in its decision on the examination of the request for invalidation, found that all the claims of the two patents involved did not possess the creativity stipulated in article 22.3 of the Patent Law, and declared the two patents invalid. On July 3, 2019, GP applied to withdraw the lawsuit against Bull on the grounds that the involved patent (ZL201010297882.4) has been declared invalid by the State Intellectual Property Office.

On the other hand, GP was quite surprised by the invalidation of the patent, believing that it seriously violated the legal principles of fairness and justice, and suspecting that there were internal and external collusionand black-box operations. On its official website, it was stated that the Intellectual Property Inquiry Network issued an announcement of Decision No. 40759 and No. 40829 invalidation request review decisions of the State Intellectual Property Office at about 11:00 am on July 3. Almost at the same time, the IPRdaily released that Chen Hao and Gao Chao, lawyers representing the case, were invited to make a brief analysis of the case, and a large amount of information was published on its website, which was “an impossible miracle”. The only explanation is that the content of the decision has been known in advance.

According to GP, "In the two decisions downloaded by the patentee from the Internet, there are erroneous in fact determination, arbitrary expansion of interpretation of claims, and false judgment without evidence". "We will resolutely continue to appeal and carry out rights protection to the end," they said.