Nokia and Xiaomi Announce Business Collaboration and Multi-Year Patent Agreement

Nokia and Xiaomi have announced that they have signed a business collaboration agreement, and a multi-year patent agreement. This includes a cross license to each company’s cellular standard essential patents. Press release from Nokia states that Xiaomi has also acquired patent assets from Nokia as part of the transaction, though the sum for this purchase has not been disclosed.

Nokia in this deal is not to be confused with HMD Global which has exclusive rights to the mobile branding “Nokia” through a licensing agreement with Nokia itself. After Nokia sold its mobile business to Microsoft, it continued with its telecommunications infrastructure business.

Under the business cooperation agreement with Xiaomi, Nokia will provide network infrastructure equipment to suit large web providers and datacenter operators.

Nokia and Xiaomi will work together on optical transport solutions for datacenter interconnect, IP Routing based on Nokia’s newly announced FP4 network processor, and a data center fabric solution. In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities for further cooperation, in areas such as Internet of Things, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

This agreement primarily focuses around Xiaomi’s extensive ecosystem and its IoT platform, rather than its smartphones especifically. The patent agreement does include a cross licence for cellular standard essential patents, though the press release does not expand as to what this specifically relates to. Standard Essential Patents are patent rights granted over technologies which establish a standard but which have no other alternatives to reach the standard. An SEP thus aims to reconcile the “private” aspect of a patent with the “public” aspect of a standard. It will be interesting to see what comes out of Xiaomi and Nokia’s agreement for a cross-license for each others cellular SEP, and one can only speculate in the absence of specifics.

What are your thoughts on Xiaomi and Nokia’s business collaboration? What do you think is included in their cellular SEP? Is this a step towards bringing Xiaomi to the rest of the world? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Nokia Newsroom