Today, Nokia announced that it"s agreed to a new partnership with Xiaomi, including a business collaboration and a multi-year patent agreement. These deals include cross-licensing for "each company"s cellular standard essential patents."
These agreements also include Xiaomi acquiring a number of patent assets from Nokia; however, details were not provided, such as how many patents were transferred or which ones.
"Xiaomi is one of the world"s leading smartphone manufacturers and we are delighted to have reached an agreement with them," said Rajeev Suri, President and CEO of Nokia. "In addition to welcoming such a prominent global technology company to our family of patent licensees, we look forward to working together on a wide range of strategic projects."
Nokia did provide some background on what the two companies will be working on together. They"ll be working on "optical transport solutions for datacenter interconnect, IP Routing based on Nokia"s newly announced FP4 network processor, and a data center fabric solution." Also, Nokia will provide network infrastructure equipment to Xiaomi "to deliver the high capacity, low power requirements expected by large web providers and datacenter operators."
Xiaomi also acquired 1,500 patents from Microsoft last May, many of which were likely old Nokia patents.