Company profile: Hisense Import & Export Co. Ltd.
Company overview. Hisense Import & Export Co., Ltd. (Chinese: 青岛海信进出口有限公司) is a Qingdao, China-based trading subsidiary of the Hisense Group, the state-owned consumer-electronics conglomerate. It was incorporated on September 16, 1998, and is registered at No. 18 Tuanjie Road in the Qingdao Economic & Technology Development Zone (the 2022 complaint lists its principal place as Hisense Tower, Qingdao). In November 2021 it was renamed Qingdao Shitong Shenghe Trading Co., Ltd., though U.S. litigation still names it under the Hisense Import & Export name. It is a small private entity (registered capital ~RMB 10.2 million); audited records from the mid-2000s show roughly 135 employees and revenue of about RMB 1.96 billion (2005) and RMB 3.5 billion (2008), but current figures are not publicly reported.
Operations. The company is Hisense Group's import/export and international trade arm — an agency that handles the group's overseas sales and distribution of electronic products, historically including HDTVs, mobile phones, and air conditioners, and which the Flexiworld complaint describes as importing and distributing Hisense televisions into the United States. It does not manufacture products itself.
Litigation posture. Hisense Import & Export is an operating-company defendant, not an NPE: it has zero plaintiff cases and one defendant case in the tracked data. The sole tracked suit — Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. v. Hisense Co., Ltd. et al. (2:22-cv-00228, filed June 24, 2022) — was brought in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division (Judge Gilstrap), a plaintiff-friendly venue, naming it among roughly a dozen Hisense-affiliated co-defendants.
Notable case. Flexiworld, an Oregon-based patent-assertion entity (classified as an NPE by Unified Patents and the Stanford NPE Litigation Database), filed three related complaints asserting 15 wireless-connectivity and content-output patents against Hisense Smart TVs, soundbars, and the RemoteNow app; the cases were later transferred to the Northern District of Georgia after Flexiworld dropped several Hisense affiliates. Hisense Import & Export was also a named respondent in a USITC Section 337 investigation concerning semiconductor devices (2019), outside the tracked district-court list.