Judge orders Qualcomm to cough up the $1 billion it owes Apple

Apple sued Qualcomm. Qualcomm huffed and puffed. The judge blew their objections down and ordered them to pay up.

From Reuters:

Judge Gonzalo Curiel of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on Thursday ruled that Qualcomm, the world's biggest supplier of mobile phone chips, was obligated to pay nearly $1 billion in rebate payments to Apple, which for years used Qualcomm's modem chips to connect iPhones to wireless data networks.

Why?

In a lawsuit filed two years ago, Apple sued Qualcomm, alleging that the chip supplier had broken the cooperation agreement by not paying nearly $1 billion in patent royalty rebates.

Qualcomm in turn alleged that it stopped paying the rebate payments because Apple had broken the agreement by urging other smartphone makers to complain to regulators and making "false and misleading" statements to the Korean Fair Trade Commission, which was investigating Qualcomm over antitrust allegations. Apple responded that it was making lawful responses to regulators in an ongoing investigation.

I continue to maintain that it would be in Qualcomm's long-term best interest to find a way to play nicer with others. The longer this drags out, the higher the chance Apple will just have its own industry leading silicon team spend some of its billions to design its own version of everything Qualcomm could have been selling them.

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