Solvay Specialty Polymers Italy v Zhejiang Fluorine Chemical New Material (CFI, 11 November 2025)

Date	11 November 2025
Court	CFI
Division	Munich (DE) Local Division
Type of action	Infringement Action
Case number(s)	UPC_CFI_771/2025
Registry reference	UPC_CFI_771/2025
Parties	Solvay Specialty Polymers Italy S.p.A. v. Zhejiang Fluorine Chemical New Material Co. a.o.

Official decision (PDF) · UPC registry entry

Dhenne Avocats represents claimants and defendants in European patent disputes before the Unified Patent Court, including the Paris divisions.

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Dhenne Avocats · 10 October 2026

Our analysis

Summary

By a reasoned order of 11 November 2025 (UPC_CFI_771/2025 and UPC_CFI_802/2025, EP 2 147 029), the panel of the Munich Local Division, on review under Rule 333, confirmed the admission to the confidentiality club of two individuals from the Syensqo group, to which Solvay Specialty Polymers Italy belongs, over the objection of Zhejiang Fluorine Chemical New Material and Hubei Fluorine New Materials. It sets out the criteria for admitting an employee of another company in the claimant’s group.

Question

May individuals who are not employed by the claimant, but perform legal and IP functions within its group, one of whom holds a position at a competing company owned by the group, have access to the defendants’ confidential information?

Decision

Rule 262A.6 limits access to the minimum necessary. Access depends on the person’s role, the relevance of the information to that role and the person’s trustworthiness, and employee status is not required. Since the concept of undertaking refers to the economic unit, with reference to CJEU case law (C-882/19), individuals working within the claimant’s group may be admitted where their functions are shared across it. A position at a competing subsidiary does not justify exclusion, since the claimant is itself a competitor and no concrete reason for distrust was given. The order of 25 September 2025 was confirmed and supplemented by a confidentiality obligation that survives the proceedings. Leave to appeal was refused, the Court of Appeal’s criteria being clear.

Key points for practice

The confidentiality club may extend to legal or IP managers of another group company where the function is performed for the economic unit as a whole.
A defendant objecting to an admission must give concrete reasons to doubt the person’s trustworthiness.

Provisions applied

Agreement on a Unified Patent Court: Art. 48
Rules of Procedure: Rules 220.2, 262A and 333
Case law cited: Court of Appeal, 12 February 2025 (UPC_CoA_621/2024)

Prepared by Dhenne Avocats from the official decision, consulted on 10 October 2026. The database is updated every week, on Friday. Only the official text is authoritative.

Going further

Lexicon: Patent infringement action.

Publications by Matthieu Dhenne: Pleading the Long Arm: What a UPC Statement of Claim Must Carry Beyond Jurisdiction (Kluwer Patent Blog).

Source and translations

Official source: Unified Patent Court registry link recorded in the record
Original language: not recorded
Translation available: no translation recorded the firm’s French record is a summary, not a translation
Date checked: not recorded

Only the official text is authoritative. A machine translation is never presented as official, republishing a third-party document requires a verified basis in rights, and a link to the source is preferred.

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Proceedings, related decisions, appeals, parties and patents as recorded in the registry and in the Dhenne Avocats corpus. Each link states its source.

Proceedings

UPC_CFI_771/2025 official number

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Parties

claimantSolvay Specialty Polymers Italy S.p.A.2 decisions in the corpus Follow this party
defendantZhejiang Fluorine Chemical New Material Co. a.oFollow this party

Exact name as it appears in the record, group affiliation only where sourced and dated.

Decisions in the same proceedings and documented appeals

No other decision in the corpus bears the same case number, and no appeal is documented in the corpus to date.

What the record states

Nature of the act: Infringement Action
Outcome (Dhenne Avocats summary): L'admission au cercle de confidentialité de deux personnes du groupe du demandeur est confirmée, la qualité de salarié du demandeur n'étant pas requise. L'ordonnance est complétée et l'autorisation d'appel refusée.
Appeal: No appeal documented in the corpus, this does not mean that no appeal was lodged.
Instance: First-instance decision, whether it has become final is not recorded.

Patents mentioned

EP 2 147 029 mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis Follow this patent

Scope: Dhenne Avocats corpus. Registry-based links are marked “official number”; links derived from the analyses are marked as such. An erroneous link can be withdrawn without deleting any record.

Patents and standards

Publication	Role in the dispute	Family	Standard and declaration	Pool	Sources
`EP 2 147 029`	Mentioned in the analysis (role not qualified) Also mentioned in 1 other decision(s): Solvay Specialty Polymers Italy v Zhejiang Fluorine Chemical New Mater	not recorded	not recorded	not recorded	Espacenet links not checked mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis

The statuses “asserted in litigation”, “declared essential”, “listed by a pool” and “essentiality examined by a court” are distinct and may coexist. Validity, infringement and technical essentiality are different questions. Scope: patents cited in the decisions of the Dhenne Avocats corpus, with no essentiality score or prediction.

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