Nokia reported its quarterly earnings today and while most of us are wondering how many Windows Phone handsets it sold last quarter, our friends at PhoneScoop picked out an interesting fact: Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the quarter for “Platform Support Payments.”
We had heard that Microsoft was paying Nokia billions to adopt Windows Phone as its main smartphone platform but this gives us a little insight into how this payment process is going to work. Microsoft licenses its Windows Phone software to handset makers but it’s clear that the two companies have a special relationship – Nokia is still giving Microsoft some money for the software but it’s likely much less money than other handset makers have to pay.
“We have a competitive software royalty structure, which includes minimum software royalty commitments. Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars,” Nokia wrote.
We may never know the exact details of the Microsoft, Nokia deal but I applaud Microsoft for spending a lot of money and doing whatever it can to try and make Windows Phone a success. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen it open up its wallet, as we know it was paying developers or offering free development resources to create apps for its fledgling smartphone platform.
[Via PhoneScoop, Nokia, image]
