Cumulative mobile-SEP royalty payments no more than around 5% of mobile handset revenues

As indicated in the recent IP Finance guest posting about the US Court of Appeals judgment in Microsoft Corp. versus Motorola Inc., by Kevin Winters, in some cases there can be a massive difference between what a licensor asks for and what a licensee ends up paying in fees and royalty rates for standard-essential patents. My latest blog posting assesses cumulative royalties paid on SEPs in mobile phones, including multiple licensors, by adding up what is actually paid and what is conservatively the maximum likely to be paid, where actual payment figures are not publicly available. This total is far lower than that calculated by simply piling-up every licensor's rate demands. Expressed as a yield on total mobile handset sales revenues, it is a much smaller percentage than this speculative and defective "royalty stack" calculation.

Cumulative mobile-SEP royalty payments no more than around 5% of mobile handset revenues

Vested interests including leaders at the mobile operator-dominated NGMN Alliance promote the notion that patent licensing fee rates are “perceived” to be too high in mobile technologies; but without substantiation for such claims. Speculation that patent fees, largely for mobile SEPs, may total 30 percent of smartphone costs are projected by Intel and others.[1]  This grossly inflated figure is based on theories of hold-up and royalty stacking that lack empirical support and it ignores marketplace realities including cross licensing and discounting rates for other reasons in patent-licensing agreement negotiations, as I have already noted here and here.  That percentage would equate to more than $110 billion being paid per year in patent fees based on total global handset revenues estimated by Morgan Stanley and IDC to be  $377 billion in 2013 and $410 billion in 2014.

Actual payments are much smaller than such perceptions and projections. The following table summarizes fairly exhaustive analysis of significant mobile-SEP licensing costs based on reported licensing revenues from the audited financial reports of major licensors and other public sources including patent pool rate-card charges.  Based on these figures, it is implausible that total royalties actually paid, including lump sums and running royalties, for standard-essential 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies, amount to more than approximately $20 billion per year. This figure represents a cumulative royalty yield for licensors of around five percent on mobile handset revenues.

Mobile SEP Licensing Fee Revenues and Royalty Yields on Global Handset Market

	2014
	Revenues	Yield*
Major SEP owners with licensing programs: Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, InterDigital, Qualcomm	$10.6 billion	2.6%
Patent Pools: SIPRO (WCDMA), Via Licensing (LTE), Sisvel (LTE)	<$4 billion	<1%
Others: including Apple, Huawei, RIM, Samsung, LG	<$6 billion	<1.5%
Cumulative maximum:  fees and yield for mobile SEPs	~$20 billion	~5%

* Yields are total licensing fee revenues including lump sums and running royalties as a percentage of $410 billion in total global handset revenues

The majority of mobile-SEP licensing fees are earned by five companies with licensing programs who have collectively contributed most patented technologies to 2G, 3G and 4G standards.  Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, InterDigital, Nokia and Qualcomm altogether generate $10.6 billion per year in licensing fees for these and other technologies. Also collectively, this represents a yield of significantly less than three percent of total global revenues for mobile handsets including smartphones.

Cumulative mobile-SEP fees paid also include less than around one percent of total handset revenues to the three mobile-SEP patent pools plus, at most, one percent or so more to other companies licensing mobile SEPs bilaterally. Patent pools lay out their prices and so these indicate the maximum they might be able to collect with willing and responsive licensees and a lot of licensing effort on the part of the pool administrators. The remaining significant mobile-SEP owners are predominantly handset manufacturers who mainly cross-license to reduce royalty out-payments rather than generate royalty income, and so their royalty fee revenues are relatively small. With each percent of royalty yield on total handset revenues now representing more than $4 billion per year in patent fees, there is insufficient evidence and no justification to conclude that opportunists not included in any of the above categories, including so-called patent trolls, patent-assertion entities and other non-practising entities, yield more than a fraction of a percent of total handset costs.

As a percentage of all consumer charges, including handset costs and $1.13 trillion in mobile operator services (GSMA Wireless Intelligence figures), which are also highly dependent on SEP technologies, the cumulative royalty yield shrinks to 1.3 percent.  Deriving this lower percentage yield figure from the broader revenue base is also applicable because it is the innovative and relatively new SEP-based technologies including 3G HSDPA/HSPA and 4G LTE which enable and drive mobile broadband data service growth. Operator revenues in mobile data services (other than basic SMS text messaging) grew from single-digit percentages of total service revenues until the introduction of HSDPA a decade ago, to around 40 percent across the entire Vodafone Group with many different national operators, for example, in 2015, according to the company's annual reports.

My more detailed and much lengthier analysis is in a pdf here.

[1]  A working paper entitled The Smartphone Royalty Stack: Surveying Royalty Demands for the Components Within Modern Smartphones was published by one in-house lawyer at Intel and two outside counsel from WilmerHale. Intel Vice President and Associate General Counsel Ann Armstrong and Wilmer Hale's Joseph Mueller and Timothy Syrett argue that aggregate patent licensing fees including SEPs and non-SEPs are excessive at around $120 per $400 smartphone.