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Apple Wanted To Charge Samsung How Much?

This article is more than 10 years old.

The Great Apple Samsung patent fight carries on in court. Now we're finding out how much Apple wanted to charge Samsung for those patents and design features. It's a fairly substantial sum too:

Samsung was warned in August 2010 that its Android-powered gadgets infringed Apple's patents and copied the iPhone, the jury was told. The Cupertino company added: “Many more Apple patents are relevant to the Android platform [and] Apple has not authorised the use of any of these patents.”

Then in October that year, Apple sent over a presentation outlining how Samsung was ripping off its stuff and how much it should pay. The fruity firm offered a licence fee of $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet.

As I say, a pretty significant sum. A good 10% of the wholesale price of the kit I would think. Which is high indeed for a license.

The complicating part of this is that Apple then offered Samsung a discount on such fees if Samsung would license to Apple Samsung's own patents. A 20% discount for a simple cross licensing agreement in fact.

Meaning that Apple was valuing access to Samsung's patents at $6 to $8 a phone or tablet.

However, as part and parcel of the very same case we've got Samsung suing Apple for non-payment of license fees on Samsung patents that Apple has been using. And we know very well that Apple has been using these patents as they are part of the general standards. And yet Apple has rejected out of hand paying anything like $6 to $8 per unit for access to those patents. Apple might be right to do so too: for those sorts of fees would be well above the FRAND levels that Samsung needs to offer them at precisely because they are part of the standards.

But it does seem very odd indeed that at one point Apple is valuing access to Samsung's patents at that $6 level, and then at the same time insisting that it would never even think of actually paying that much for access to them.