While the actual Nokia may be out of the smartphone manufacturing business, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still profiting from smartphone sales. Besides the IP licensing deal they made with HMD Global last year, the company also owns a lot of patents when it comes to the technology we see in the average smartphone these days. To this end, Nokia has just announced they have entered into a multi-year patent license agreement with Huawei for an unspecified number of years.
The technology we use every single day can cost companies lots of funds in research and development costs. Even if something seems obvious or trivial, it still may not have been so simple when it was first created. This becomes especially true when a feature becomes mainstream and the original company that innovated that front deserves a slice of the revenue from anyone who borrows it. Nokia has just finished a dispute against Apple which led to them being awarded $2 billion up-front, and other companies want to avoid these types of legal disputes.
Xiaomi signed a multi-year patent agreement with Nokia back in July of this year, and today it has been revealed that Huawei has signed one as well. The details of these agreements are hardly ever revealed to the public, and the consumer doesn’t typically need to be bothered with them in the first place. A statement made today by Maria Varsellona, chief legal officer at Nokia, said the company is “delighted to welcome [Huawei] to our family of patent licensees.”
Again, we won’t be told how long this multi-year agreement has been laid out for, or which patents are included in it either. As always though, Nokia will follow its existing practices for disclosing patent licensing revenue in its quarterly financial reports. We’re told that they are expecting the revenue from this deal to begin to be recognized in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Source: Nokia
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