Defendant
1 case as defendant.
De'Longhi S.p.A. (BIT: DLG) is an Italian small-domestic-appliance manufacturer headquartered in Treviso, Italy. The group traces its origins to a family workshop founded in 1902, but the current corporate entity dates from 1974. It has been listed on Borsa Italiana's main market since 2001 and is controlled by the De'Longhi family through holding companies (De'Longhi Industrial S.A. / De Longhi Soparfi SA). It reported roughly €3.5 billion in 2024 revenue and about 10,300 employees, with manufacturing sites in Italy, China, Romania and Switzerland.
Products / operations. De'Longhi designs and sells small kitchen and home-comfort appliances, distributed in more than 120 markets. Its largest business is coffee — manual and fully automatic espresso machines under the De'Longhi brand, plus professional/commercial coffee equipment via its La Marzocco and Eversys subsidiaries. Other lines include food preparation (Kenwood, Braun, Ariete, NutriBullet, Magic Bullet), air treatment and portable heating, and domestic cleaning products. It is an operating company with real product revenue, not a patent-holding shell.
Patent-litigation posture. The tracked data show one case, in which De'Longhi is the defendant and has never appeared as plaintiff — the profile of an operating company being sued rather than a patent assertion entity. The single case is NuWave LLC v. De'Longhi S.p.A., filed 2017-11-30 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, pleading patent infringement. NuWave LLC is itself an operating company (a Libertyville, Illinois maker of small countertop appliances), which has filed a handful of infringement suits against competitors; this is therefore operating-company-versus-operating-company litigation over appliance technology, not an NPE campaign. Venue is the plaintiff's home district rather than a plaintiff-friendly outlier such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Context. The dispute falls within De'Longhi's core countertop-appliance space (grills, ovens and similar cooking products, where NuWave holds design and utility patents). No further tracked U.S. patent suits, acquisitions or funding relationships tied to this case are recorded in the database. Details such as case outcome and any licensing or settlement terms are not available from the structured data and were not verified.
Patent infringement action filed by NuWave LLC against De'Longhi S.p.A. in the Northern District of Illinois. The docket shows the case is closed, but the narrative states no judgment, settlement terms, or appeal were disclosed, and the specific pleaded patent was not verified from the complaint.