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The Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has confirmed that Microsoft is demanding royalty payments from it over products using Androidsoftware.
Victor Xu, chief marketing officer for Huawei Devices, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday evening that "negotiations are in progress" over licensing certain Microsoft patents which the American software giant claims are infringed by hardware implementations of Android.
"Yes, Microsoft has come to us," Xu said on Monday as the company launched a new smartphone and 7in tablet for the UK market. "We always respect the intellectual property of companies. But we have 65,000 patents worldwide too. We have enough to protect our interests. We are a very important stakeholder in Android."
Microsoft has already extracted per-device royalty agreements for Android products from at least 10 companies, including Samsung, the world's largest smartphone maker, HTC, Compal Electronics (whose customers include Dell, HP and Toshiba), Quanta Computer, Wistron, General Dynamics Itronix, Velocity Micro, Onkyo, Acer, and Viewsonic. In a blogpost in October Microsoft's Brad Smith said that the licence agreement with Compal meant that "companies accounting for more than half of all Android devices have now entered into patent licence agreements with Microsoft"."
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