Stefan Mileschin

Partial payment from a disputed licensee

Qualcomm Technologies Licensing (QTL) has announced that a licensee in dispute with the company decided to pay it $500 million, something that heavily reflected on the QTL financial results for fiscal Q3 2018. This number goes on top of a good fiscal Q3 2018 where the company beat previous estimates.

It is not a big secret that Qualcomm is in dispute with some big players, the most prominent being Apple, but this $500 million partial payment might signal that the negotiations continue in good faith. The amount in dispute goes back the to third quarter of fiscal 2017 and it is not a full amount of the due royalties.

Qualcomm didn’t announce the name of the licensee, but it's easy to suspect who that might be. QTL has previously issued guidance that it is and expected to reach revenues between $0.85 billion and $1.05 billion but the $500 million payment sky pushed up the financial numbers all the way to $1.47 billion.

As a result of that expected 50 to 54 percent margin ended up being 72 percent margin. Here at Fudzilla we've always implied that Apple and Qualcomm and all other licensing disputes will end up in a settlement. One of the largest ones that Qualcomm settled was Meizu, in the last days of 2016. Since then, Meizu announced phones using Qualcomm chipsets. Some good came out of all that.

https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/468...ra-500-million