China seems to have mastered the skill of putting pressure on large companies, with one of the world’s most valuable companies, Apple, being just the latest victim. Last week, a judge at the Beijing Patent Court ruled that Apple’s iPhone 6 family of smartphones is violating the intellectual property rights of a Chinese company called "Shenzhen Baili Marketing Services". It’s a curious outcome for the technology giant from Cupertino, because the Chinese Company is so small, it doesn’t’ even have a web site. Nobody is answering the phone number listed in the court papers. And when journalists from the Wall Street Journal decided to dig deeper and go to the company’s official address, it turned out that there were no offices, and that nobody had ever heard of the company either.

Still, Shenzhen Baili was represented in court by a real patent lawyer, Mr Andy Yang, who also had helped prepare the applications for the patents granted to employees of the company. At he heart of the court case where images of industrial designs for two phones allegedly developed by Shenzhen Baili, the 100C and 100C Plus. They supposedly proved that when developing the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the engineers in Cupertino had simply copied devices designed by their unknown Chinese rivals. Mr. Yang argues that this is the first proven case of an American company stealing the intellectual property of a Chinese firm. If Apple copied its rival, it did so with unerring accuracy. The phone cases, for example, have curves that match the Chinese "original" to a hundredth of an arc, and so it goes for all the other design elements of the two phones.

Surprisingly, though, neither the 100C nor the 100C Plus can be bought anywhere in China. They can not be had in any store, and no reputable website has ever published a picture of either phone.

Some retailers have stepped forward, testifying that they have sold plenty of Shenzhen Baili phones, but none of them has been able to show journalists any; when challenged, these shopkeepers claim that all their stock has sold out.

It’s a rather intriguing situation, not least as Shenzhen Baili’s patent was issued by the Chinese Patent Office four months before Apple received its own patent from the US Patent Office. The Chinese court’s verdict also is highly dubious, because it prohibits the sale of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models only in Beijing, and not the whole of China. No explanation has been given why these patents might have been infringed only in the Chinese capital. Apple for its part says that it will ignore the case and continue to sell its smartphones.

It’s not the first time Apple has run into patent trouble in China. The same Beijing Court stopped Apple from making use of the brand names "iPhone" and "iPad" because a Chinese manufacturer of bags and purses registered them previously. In China, Apple sells the "6", not the iPhone 6.

Despite such trouble, US companies will continue to fight for access to the Chinese market; it’s simply too large for them to be able to ignore it. Gaining or retaining market leadership in China, however, will not be easy, because US companies will have to fight not just the phantom menace of little known companies in the patent courts, but also real rivals, like China’s homegrown technology giants Huawei and ZTE.