Russian Phone Company (RPC), the retail wing of major mobile operator MTS, announced last week that it had filed a number of lawsuits against the world’s four major mobile handset makers.
According to the lawsuits, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG are accused of systematically violating deadlines in contractual obligations for non-functional handsets. The four companies are also accused of violating customers’ rights.
“When a customer demands a refund for a non-functional handset, the manufacturer repairs it instead and then returns to us,” a RPC spokesperson told IT sector news website CNews.ru. “We reimburse our customers with our own money and ultimately get a warehouse full of repaired handsets that can’t be sold.”
Only about 10% of the handsets returned for a refund are broken because of improper use. The remaining 90% have manufacturer defects, RPC says.
The settlements claimed by RPC in the suits against handset makers were not disclosed.
RPC has already won a number of similar proceedings against Samsung and LG, the firm claims. Litigation has not always favored RPC, however — it lost a court battle against Nokia before the Russian International Commercial Arbitration Court, a Nokia Russia legal director told CNews.
Other major Russian mobile operators MegaFon and VimpelCom, as well as handset retailers Euroset and Svyaznoy, periodically encounter service problems but try to negotiate solutions out of the court, their representatives reported.
Right after the news of lawsuits last week, RPC general manager Sergey Rumyantsev stepped down from his position. This Monday, Rumyantsev was appointed project director at Svyaznoy, one of RPC’s major competitors and a former employer of Rumyantsev.
Sources: CNews, Prime-Tass
