Nokia and Xiaomi set to collaborate on a range of strategic projects

Finnish mobile maker Nokia and Chinese consumer electronic giant Xiaomi signed an agreement to business collaboration and patent licensing. The multi-year cross-licensing deal involves exchange of company's cellular standard essential patents, which will aid development of new products for both companies. This means exchange of all the essential patent required to allow products to adhere to industry standard. To recall, Xiaomi also bought 1,500 patents from Microsoft last year.

Apart from the cross-licensing deal, Xiaomi has also shared undisclosed patents from Nokia. Nokia will provide network equipments to Xiaomi under the deal, and will also IP transport solution in partnership. Also, both the companies have agreed to “further cooperate” in areas such as Internet of Things, augmented reality, virtual reality and Artificial intelligence. 

Nokia has agreed to provide “network infrastructure to deliver high capacity, low power requirements for large web providers and data centre operators”. Moreover the agreement says that both the companies “will work together on optical transport solutions for datacentre interconnect, IP routing based on Nokia's newly announced 'FP4' network processor and a data centre fabric solution.”

Xiaomi, once the key player in Chinese smartphone market saw a dip once new entrants Vivo and Oppo debuted in the country. While Chinese market share for Xiaomi has seen a drop, the company is still going strong in the Indian market with over $1 billion in revenue in 2016. 

"As a company seeking to deliver more exciting technological innovations to the world, we are excited at the opportunity to work more closely with Nokia in future," said Lei Jun, Chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, in a statement.

Nokia has a strong history in mobile industry, which involves developing many of the standards that are still in use by OEMs. The mobile making business for Nokia was dead but the company was still minting money from licensing patents.

Xiaomi and Nokia have not provided further detail on which patents are acquired by Xiaomi, neither any financial details are revealed.

"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," added Rajeev Suri, President and CEO of Nokia.