Providing no new details, Qualcomm has issued a statement confirming that it and Apple have renewed the existing patent licensing agreement first signed in 2019, with an effective date of April 1, 2027.
In one introductory sentence, and one quote, Qualcomm dropped the news of the renewal on the world. The first sentence states the agreement's effective date.
"We are pleased to extend the Apple license agreement," said John Han, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Qualcomm Technology Licensing in the second sentence.
There are no details yet about how long the license pact is for. The last one had a five-year initial term, with a two-year extension possible. That two-year extension expires on the last day of March, 2027.
In January 2017, Apple filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm, alleging the chip producer had withheld approximately $1 billion in royalty payments to Apple, in retaliation for cooperating with South Korean antitrust investigations, along with claims of extortion, monopolistic practices, and price gouging.
In the suit, Apple claimed Qualcomm insisted on charging Apple "at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined."
Apple's lawsuit followed shortly after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission stepped in with its own suit, accusing Qualcomm of forcing Apple into a baseband exclusivity deal from 2011 until 2016, by offering lower royalty payments in the form of rebates.
The following April, Qualcomm made its own filing with the court denying Apple's complaint, accusing it of attempting to pay less than the fair market value for access to Qualcomm's standard essential payments, breach of contract, and wrongly inducing regulatory action in a number of jurisdictions, among other issues.
Once the exclusivity period ended, Apple started to diversify its modem suppliers to include Intel, but this partnership was also a source of issue for Qualcomm. In a filing from September 2018, Qualcomm claims Apple stole trade secrets relating to its intellectual property that it provided to Intel, specifically software used to improve the performance of its baseband chips.
It's not clear how much Apple is paying per iPhone equipped with a Qualcomm modem up to and including the iPhone 18 Pro Max US model. It is estimated that Apple is paying between $8 and $9 per device.
Apple's C2 modem is in Apple's US iPhone 18 Pro model.
