Last week, several developments emphasized how the increasing power of the Chinese mobile industry is putting pressure on smartphone vendors which once seemed untouchable. Samsung was expanding its cloud services platform in response to the squeeze on its handset sales, mainly coming from Chinese rivals like Huawei with its high-impact P9 model. And Apple is threatened with a bar on iPhone 6 sales in China because of a patent lawsuit brought by a local handset maker, Baili – an action which illustrates how Chinese firms are becoming major IPR players. The Beijing intellectual property authority has ruled that Apple violated the design patents of Baili and that features of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are too similar to Baili’s…