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Nokia hands Qualcomm €1.7bn to close patent dispute

Not a secret anymore

Nokia has finally revealed the price it paid to settle its acrimonious patent dispute with Qualcomm three months ago.

The firms finally buried their long-running trademark dispute in July, but at the time refused to disclose the price of the deal.

Yesterday Nokia finally confirmed that they had struck a 15-year agreement giving Nokia a licence for all Qualcomm’s patents for its mobile devices and Nokia Siemens Networks kit.

This includes a €1.7bn lump sum, payable in the fourth quarter of 2008, which Nokia will expense over the term of the agreement.

While this is a not inconsiderable amount of cash to drop, Nokia said together with other licence agreements struck in the fourth quarter, it actually “incurred a slightly positive impact to its gross margin during the quarter, as the royalty provisions earlier recorded well covered the related obligations”.

This will be very slight comfort for the phone firm, as overall its income was 21 per cent to €1.5bn, on revenues down five per cent to €12.2bn.

The IP slugging match kicked off in 2005, and covered a variety of technologies, including GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMAX, LTE and other technologies.

Like any good fight between giants in their field, it covered multiple venues as the protagonists sought import bans on their battling technologies.®

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