French company Wiko has been forced to stop selling smartphones in the Netherlands. This follows a lost lawsuit with Philips over the use of patented 3G+.
It was Bright who discovered the pronunciation. The verdict already took place in December, after which Wiko was given up to 4 weeks to take her phones off the shelves. That seems to have worked: at the time of writing, not a single Wiko phone is for sale online in the Netherlands anymore. However, you can still order the Wiko's from the German department of Amazon.
It is unclear whether Wiko intends to purchase a license from Philips. It doesn't look like it; the Dutch Wiko-website is offline. It is possible that the Dutch market is too small to justify the costs. Since 2011, the Franco-Chinese Wiko has been making telephones that are mainly aimed at young people and have a low price. New models were often announced around the MWC at the beginning of the year and IFA in the autumn. Many of them also reached the Dutch webshops, but that is now coming to an end for the time being. Possibly competitor Alcatel, also partly French, will benefit from this because it fishes with its models largely in the same pond.