Samsung Electronics Co. lost its bid to delay a ban on sales of its Galaxy Nexus smartphone in the U.S. until an appeals court rules on the matter.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh on Tuesday rejected Samsung’s request to stay her June 29 order while the South Korean company pursues an appeal. Koh, on July 2, denied a similar request by Samsung to put on hold a June 26 order blocking U.S. sales of the company’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 computer.

Samsung “has not raised a substantial question of invalidity” of the patents at issue in a dispute with Apple Inc., Koh wrote in the order in San Jose, California. The court “is not persuaded that Samsung has raised a substantial question or shown a likelihood of prevailing on the merits of its invalidity arguments on appeal.”

Samsung and Cupertino, California-based Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), the world’s two biggest makers of high-end phones, have accused each other of copying designs and technology for mobile devices and are fighting patent battles on four continents to retain their dominance in the $219 billion global smartphone market.

Koh rejected Samsung’s arguments that it will suffer “irreparable harm” from the injunction.

“In light of the Galaxy Nexus’s meager sales figures, any such loss in sales would be only a minuscule fraction of the entire smartphone market and would fall short of demonstrating loss of ‘substantial’ market share,” Koh wrote.

Nexus Sales

The Nexus phone is estimated to sell fewer than 1 million units a year in the U.S., according to Shin Hyun Joon, a Seoul- based analyst at Dongbu Securities Co. Samsung, which doesn’t disclose shipment figures for smartphones and tablet computers, sold 44.5 million smartphones globally in the first quarter, topping Apple, according to market researcher Strategy Analytics.

Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Samsung will be releasing a software patch for the Galaxy Nexus to address the court’s earlier decision, said Jim Prosser, a spokesman at Google. The patch should be released imminently, he said. The update aims to enable Samsung to keep shipping the device.

“We are working closely with Google to resolve this matter,” Samsung said in an e-mailed statement today. The patent in dispute concerns Google’s search function, Samsung said.

The case is Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., 12- cv-00630, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).