It was a pity, as the company has always been an innovator, coming up with ideas like modular phones, phones with rotating displays or 3D cameras, and other crazy concepts that actually made it to fruition.
LG, however, hasn’t been entirely deprived of its phone-related revenue. In an intriguing example of how it continues to collect money from its handset endeavors, LG keeps liquidating its mobile business by monetizing patents. Back in 2022, LG signed a patent agreement with Apple, and a new patent licensing with Oppo is only its second large monetization effort.
This basically leaves Oppo and the other Chinese phone makers as the most logical clients for LG’s patents. Oppo was reportedly prepared to pay a premium for them as it tries to ward off any potential patent litigation.
At the same time, now that it can sell phones globally again, Oppo would want to compile a suite of standard patterns of its own, for which it could in turn charge licensing fees in the future.
