RIM Agrees to Pay Nokia for Licensing Its WLAN Standard

At the end of November, Nokia sought to ban BlackBerry sales as RIM was told by the latter it was not entitled to ship products with the WLAN standard since it wasn’t covered in their original patent license agreement. Now, RIM has agreed to pay Nokia for these WLAN patents (as expected). Nokia made an official announcement today:

Nokia has entered into a new patent license agreement with Research In Motion. The agreement will result in settlement of all existing patent litigation between the companies and withdrawal of pending actions in the US, UK and Canada related to a recent arbitration tribunal decision.

The financial structure of the agreement includes a one-time payment and on-going payments, all from RIM to Nokia. The specific terms of the agreement are confidential.

“We are very pleased to have resolved our patent licensing issues with RIM and reached this new agreement, while maintaining Nokia’s ability to protect our unique product differentiation,” said Paul Melin, chief intellectual property officer at Nokia. “This agreement demonstrates Nokia’s industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.”

RIM released their financial results yesterday for their 2012 third quarter and lost 1 million subscribers in the quarter. Revenue was at $2.73 billion, a nearly 50% drop compared to a year ago ($5.2 billion). The company shipped 6.9 million smartphones and 255,000 PlayBooks. RIM’s stock has dropped 21% today as investors fear the company’s announcement of a tiered structure for service fees for BlackBerry 10, would hurt revenues.

BlackBerry 10 is set to launch on January 30th, with a web browser that recently went up against the iPhone 5 in a speed test.

Anyone banking on a come back from Canada’s ‘tech darling’? Or is it too little too late?