In its earning call, Nokia has talked about monetizing its unlicensed patents which constitute 90% of the total patent portfolio. So, till now the patent royalty Nokia was earning which has a run rate of 0.5 Billion EUR is just based on 10% of its patent wealth monetization. These 10% patents were mostly standard essential patents and Nokia has retained many of the remaining patents for its exclusive use (protecting the proprietary features of its own products). But now since Nokia is already planning to sell off the Devices and Service division to MS, it has added flexibility to license these product feature related patents.
Going forward, we see opportunities to expand our licensing coverage to presently unlicensed vendors and to parts of our portfolio that are not broadly licensed under our current agreements. In addition, we see the usage of cellular technologies expanding beyond phones.
Since Nokia started its licensing program several years ago, we have primarily licensed our standard essential patents, retaining the patents protecting the proprietary features of our products for our own exclusive use.
Subject to the closing of the transaction with Microsoft, we will have further flexibility in making many of these technologies available to the broader market which will provide us with new technology creation and licensing opportunities that have not yet been captured in our current revenue run rate.
This brings us to the question, are we going to see “Androids smartphones with PureView imaging tech” from other manufacturers in near future? Nokia has retained the imaging patents and MS is not willing to use PureView branding and keeping in mind the new patent monetizing strategy of Nokia, this can be a possibility. Though it is not only about imaging, we have seen HTC using HAAC mics tech illegally. Similarly there may be many more oppurtunities for Nokia to generate revenue.
Also, as seen in above paragraph, Nokia has talked about usage of cellular technologies expanding beyond phones. What does that mean? New kind of devices like wearables or some other communication devices may already be getting developed.
In a nutshell if Nokia can really monetize the remaining 90% of its valuable patent portfolio effectively, the current 0.5 Billion EUR annual run rate have chances of growing tremendously in coming quarters!!.
[embedit snippet=”madsr”]
