LG Electronics has agreed to take up a number of royalty bearing smartphone-licensing product patents from Finland-based Nokia. Nokia may not be churning out smartphones, but it has one of the strongest patent portfolios in the industry, and plans on utilising the same to its full potential.
The patents will cover a range of technologies related to communication over 2G, 3G, and 4G networks. Neither company has disclosed how much LG has paid to license these patents, but obviously they both feel this agreement is mutually beneficial.
The royalty payment procedures are subject to commercial arbitration and is expected to be completed within the next two years.
Ramzi Haidamus, President of Nokia Technologies, said in a prepared statement,
We are pleased to welcome LG Electronics to our licensing program. We’ve worked constructively with LG Electronics and agreed to a mutually beneficial approach, including the use of independent arbitration to resolve any differences. This agreement sets the scene for further collaboration between our companies in future.
Through this development, LG has become the 60th licensee of Nokia’s mobile communication tech and the first major OEM to join the licensee program ever since Nokia’s Devices and Service division was sold off to Microsoft for $7.2bn.
The deal shows how Nokia still makes a lot of money in the smartphone space, despite lagging behind rivals Samsung and Apple to a significant extent due to a hardware-less presence. Credits go to it’s massive patent portfolio spanning across mobile technologies like 2G, 3G, 4G, design and some critical mobile phone features that most OEMs can’t do without.
The Finnish company also rolled out a tablet named Nokia N1, which is more of a prototype available for patenting. While N1 sparked off speculations that Nokia might be looking for a comeback into hardware, the company has been stressing the fact that it will continue to work towards patenting hardware technologies and will not be looking to manufacture them.
