Qualcomm is seriously suffering at the moment, announcing that it will lay off a lot of employees to cover losses of over 1 billion dollars after Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), and other partners refused to pay him licenses. In the hope that they will manage to end the dispute with Apple, and subsidiarily with other partners controlled by Apple, those from Qualcomm come with an attractive proposal.
Qualcomm announced that, first of all, it will allow its partners to license technologies for phones at a cost of 3.25% of the price of each device, instead of 5%. The decrease seems small, but at hundreds of millions of phones sold annually, it increases exponentially, but the "icing on the cake" is that Qualcomm is willing to offer free licenses for 5G technologies.
iPhone prices could drop thanks to Qualcomm
Qualcomm makes its products much more attractive with this new licensing strategy, and boosts the adoption of 5G technology for future mobile phones. In the end, those from Qualcomm announced that they will charge for licensing only 400 dollars from the price of a phone, 100 dollars less than what they charge now, and for Apple, Samsung, or Huawei, the difference is huge.
"We have not lowered the rate. What we're doing is including more technology, more (intellectual property) in the offering without increasing the price. What we're doing here is creating a foundation for stability going forward. Qualcomm also announced last week that it would assess its patent fees against only the first $400 (£291) of a phone's net selling price. Rogers said the previous price cap was $500, a figure that was well known among industry insiders but that Qualcomm did not make public."
The proposal made by those from Qualcomm is a very interesting one, and those from Apple could try to take advantage of the opportunity to substantially reduce their licensing fees for iPhone and iPad. Apple would pay a license of a maximum of 20 dollars to Qualcomm for each phone sold, compared to an average equivalent to double this amount, and thus the war between the companies could be completed.
