The final check that San Diego’s Qualcomm must write to smartphone maker BlackBerry for overpayment of patent royalties is $940 million.
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BlackBerry released the total settlement amount Friday. Qualcomm will make the payment by May 31.
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In April, a three-judge arbitration panel ruled that BlackBerry overpaid for patent royalties between 2010 and 2015 after its smartphone sales collapsed.
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The refund itself totals $815 million. The arbitration panel also ordered Qualcomm to pay attorney’s fees, plus 10 percent interest dating back to 2015.
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Qualcomm reduced patent licensing revenue for the March quarter by $974 million as an accrual for the BlackBerry award.
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Qualcomm not only makes chips that power smartphones, but also licenses its portfolio of thousands of cellular patents to smartphone makers.
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These patent license agreements vary with each smartphone maker. A few handset firms, such as BlackBerry, agree to pay a set amount in advance of device sales — betting that they’ll sell enough smartphones to lower their overall per-device royalty costs.
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Wall Street analysts estimate that BlackBerry agreed to prepay Qualcomm between $2 billion to $2.3 billion in patent royalties on smartphone sales from 2010 to 2015.
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But when BlackBerry’s smartphone sales tumbled amid competition from Apple and Android devices — dropping from 53 million phones in 2012 to just 7 million in 2015 — it ended up overpaying.
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While prepayments are supposedly nonrefundable, BlackBerry argued that Qualcomm has per-device royalty caps that should apply — even when a phone maker pays in advance.
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The arbitration panel agreed. Its decision is binding and can’t be appealed. Qualcomm said the ruling has no impact on agreements with other device makers.
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The BlackBerry setback comes as Qualcomm’s patent licensing business is increasingly under attack from government regulators and smartphone makers.
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Qualcomm has been fined more than $900 million by South Korea’s anti-monopoly regulator, which is demanding changes in the way the company…