Apple Paid Nokia $2 Billion To Escape Fight Over Old Patents

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple's latest patent spat with Nokia resulted in a $2 billion up-front payment from the iPhone maker, a colossal sum that seems to indicate Apple was eager to avoid a protracted and ugly dispute that could rival the one it had with Samsung. The new details of the settlement, which was first announced back in May without the disclosure of a financial amount or the new licensing terms, were spotted in Nokia's second quarter earnings release. "We got a substantial upfront cash payment of $2 billion from Apple, strengthening further our cash position. As said earlier, our plans is to provide more details on the intended use of cash in conjunction with our Q3 earnings," reads the official transcript of Nokia's quarterly earnings call with investors yesterday. Neither Nokia nor Apple have disclosed the terms of the new licensing deal, including whether it involves recurring payments or how many years it will be in place.

Re:

[NotQuiteReal]

Just out of curiosity, why have your balls been damned? (I am sure your are correct in your assessment, I just want to help others.)

Two billion; or, as Tim Cook calls it...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Pocket change.

Re:

[Zontar The Mindless]

It's a *fact* that Apple's sitting on a huge pile of money. Acknowledging this *fact* does not entail a value judgement, any more than acknowledging the *fact* that Hitler very nearly conquered Europe does not imply admiration for him in any size, shape, or form.

Thanks for this opportunity to Godwin the thread.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Don't be silly. They'll pay this out of money sitting in the US, so that they can report a $2bn loss, which should nicely offset a big chunk of tax. It's only money coming in that you don't want to put on your books in the US, money going out always comes from the jurisdictions with the highest tax rates.

Re:

[Whibla]

I think this is called having your cake, and gleefully stuffing your face with it in front of the starving masses!

Can't disagree with your analysis however...

That's because Apple hasn't been paying its owners

[Solandri]

Steve Jobs hated paying dividends (profit which is supposed to go to stockholders). Apple stopped paying dividends when Jobs was re-hired in 1995, and started paying them again shortly after his death in 2012. The $200+ billion in cash Apple has in the bank almost exactly equals how much it should have paid out in dividends [statista.com] during Jobs' reign. So I suspect what happened is the board complied with Jobs' wish not to pay dividends to stockholders, but only on the condition that they bank it so they could de

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Steve Jobs hated paying dividends (profit which is supposed to go to stockholders). Apple stopped paying dividends when Jobs was re-hired in 1995, and started paying them again shortly after his death in 2012. The $200+ billion in cash Apple has in the bank almost exactly equals how much it should have paid out in dividends during Jobs' reign. So I suspect what happened is the board complied with Jobs' wish not to pay dividends to stockholders, but only on the condition that they bank it so they could decid

Re:Evolution is intellectual fraud

[NotQuiteReal]

I was having lunch with God (in Tokyo). We were having bacon cheeseburgers, and he snorted milkshake out of his nose when I showed him this post.

Re:

[fabriciom]

You are lost in life.

Re:

[thereitis]

"Do you really believe that all the 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 (326 quintillion) estimated gallons of water upon the earth came from outerspace?"

Yes I do believe it because *everything* is from outer space. What the Sun is made of, the Earth and Moon, the countless galaxies. The the large number you quoted only accounts for [see-the-sea.org] 0.022 percent of the total weight (mass is a better term) of the Earth. The Sun weighs something like 1.989 × 10^30 kg. It contains 99.86% of our solar system's total mass.

Pay someone.

[msauve]

"...our plans is to... " reads the official transcript...

With $2,000,000,000, they should be able to pay someone who can write in English.

Re:

[aliquis]

With $2,000,000,000, they should be able to pay someone who can write in English.

With 2 billion dollars they could likely get me to try to learn finish even though I don't know grammar at any language at all and it seem like such a pain (then again to be fair they have had to learn Swedish so ..)

Re: Pay someone.

[Anonymous Coward]

...where Swedish is an official language and a mandatory subject in school.

Re:

[nonicknameavailable]

That most finns don't care about

Re:

[aliquis]

Nokia is in Finland.

I know. And I'm in Sweden.

The point was that Finnish people native tongue isn't English, it's Finnish.
But as Sweden and Finland has been the same country for 700 years time Sweden has played a major role in the developing of their society and even though we're split they still have mandatory Swedish over there. So all Finns learn Swedish.

So, add it all together and the idea of my post was that for $2 billion I was willing to learn Finnish to understand them, and to mention that they have already learned my

Re:

[aliquis]

Nokia is in Finland.

Should had said development. I still haven't slept and it's 11:16 AM. Maybe that's not exclusively why but .. (some AlzheimerÂs? Type as I think, ..)

Again?

[lobiusmoop]

I though Nokia and Apple settled their patent problems in 2011 [theguardian.com]

Billion?

[tquasar]

Two billion doesn't go that far today.