Nokia, Samsung settle patent dispute, investors disappointed

Nokia has settled its dispute with Samsung over the value of patents being used by the smartphone vendor but the resulting award has disappointed investors and Nokia’s share price has suffered.

This wasn’t a dispute about patent infringement, and simply sought to ascertain how much Nokia was due as a result of Samsung’s using of its technological patents. Nokia claims its Technologies division is expected to report net sales of €400m for Q4 2015 adjusted to include this announcement – and approximately €1bn for the full year 2015.

However, the City appears unimpressed with the value of the award and had clearly anticipated a higher return. The price of Nokia shares at the time of writing had dropped by nearly 12% after the announcement.

Reuters reports Nokia is embroiled in a similar arbitration settlement case with LG, and has contract renewal talks with Apple pencilled into the diary over coming years. Perhaps the negative hit on Nokia’s share price is a nervous response to what investors consider a disappointing outcome from the ruling, hoping that a precedent hasn’t already been set.

The Finnish kit vendor has been busy in recent days getting its MWC announcements out early, and accompanied today’s awarding with two network-centric announcement relating to mobile and fixed broadband.

Firstly, it’s planning on showing off its LTE-Advanced Pro tech using 3D Beamforming in Barcelona, claiming multiple industry “firsts” which will ultimately triple downlink capacity on TDD spectrum. Tero Peltola, Nokia’s head of FDD and TDD LTE, claimed: “Nokia’s 3D Beamforming, for downlink and uplink, is an early innovation and has been field tested in Hangzhou, China. We are also responding to the need for more capacity by enabling comprehensive aggregation of TDD and FDD LTE networks.”

Meanwhile, Nokia also announced a lab trial completed with Deutsche Telekom demonstrating XG-FAST, a copper-optimising fixed broadband access technology. It claims that XG-FAST will be able to shove speeds of more than 11Gbps through existing copper networks at 50m, if lab-trial results are anything to go by.

Federico Guillén, Nokia’s president of fixed networks, sees this as being the start of the next generation of copper capabilities. “The XG-FAST trial with Deutsche Telekom represents an important milestone in our ongoing efforts to extend the potential of copper for delivering ultra-fast speeds, while also bringing fibre closer to residential and business users.