CEO says HTC is happy with Apple settlement, but denies details

On Saturday, November 10, Apple and HTC announced that they had reached an unprecedented settlement that would effectively end their nearly 3 year-long patent war. The deal also included a 10-year cross-licensing agreement.

Other than that though, details surrounding the treaty have been fairly scarce. Analysts have opined that HTC agreed to pay Apple between $6-$8 per Android handset sold. But according to the company’s CEO, that’s not the case…

Reuters passes along some comments from HTC’s Chief Executive Officer Peter Chou:

“I think that these estimates are baseless and very, very wrong. It is a outrageous number, but I’m not going to comment anything on a specific number. I believe we have a very, very happy settlement and a good ending.”

Using the aforementioned $6-$8 per handset figure, analysts predicted that Apple could make $280 million a year from the HTC settlement, or some $3 billion over the course of 10 years. But if Chou says those figures are off, there’s no telling what the deal’s worth.

And it’s actually pretty hard to tell who had more leverage out of the two companies. Apple won some significant victories against HTC, but HTC has been rounding up patents from its S3 purchase, and was even borrowing some from Google. So who caved?

In the end, what really matters is that the deal was made, ending an intense legal battle between the two handset-makers that dated all the way back to 2010. It’s just unfortunate that we won’t likely see a similar deal with Samsung anytime soon.