• Both the companies had been locked in an unpleasant patent dispute since the last few years.
   
• The multibillion-dollar payment stands out to be a big victory for Qualcomm.

The U.S.-based multinational telecommunications equipment company Qualcomm has reportedly announced that it hopes to receive at least $4.5 billion from its settlement agreement with the American technology giant Apple Inc. For those uninitiated, both the companies had been locked in an unpleasant patent dispute since the last few years.

As per authentic sources, last month Apple and Qualcomm ended a long-standing, major patent and antitrust case, which had commenced when Apple had sued the latter for suspected unfair practices of patent licensing for about $1 billion. The dispute took an ugly turn when Qualcomm had filed a countersuit for around $7 billion. Qualcomm turned out to be the apparent winner, attaining a 6-year licensing deal & a chip supply agreement, along with the major one-off payment.  

The multibillion-dollar payment stands out to be a big victory for Qualcomm, which has mentioned in its quarterly earnings report, its expectations to gain a total of $4.7 billion to around $5.5 billion in regular revenue over the upcoming quarter. The company said that its legal war is not significantly an immediate game changer, although the deal has positioned the firm to be the sole 5G modem supplier of Apple, given Intel’s withdrawal from the market.

According to the Qualcomm Chief Executive, Steven Mollenkopf, the rest of the fiscal year is estimated to be affected by a slower market for devices specifically in China, which is upstream of the greater global rollouts of 5G. While, Chief Financial Officer David Wise lowered the estimate of Qualcomm for the 2019 communications-chip shipments by around 50 million units, given the market weakness in China and an expansion of the handset replacement recycle, which potentially reflects a pause ahead of 5G rollouts.

Source Credits: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/1/18525962/qualcomm-apple-settlement-4-5-billion-dollars-patent

https://gizmodo.com/qualcomm-scored-4-5-billion-or-more-in-settlement-with-1834461996

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-deal-doesnt-solve-qualcomms-problems-2019-05-01