BlackBerry said on Wednesday Qualcomm was asked to pay the Canadian company about $814.9 million in an interim arbitration decision over royalty overpayments.
Blackberry’s stock surged over 15% in pre-market trading on the news.
The companies in 2016 decided to arbitrate a dispute over Qualcomm’s agreement to cap certain royalties applied to payments made by BlackBerry under a licensing deal.
In late March, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said the company expects to be profitable on an adjusted basis and generate positive free cash flow for the year ending February 2018, according to Reuters.
“Looking ahead to fiscal 2018, we expect to grow at or above the overall market in our software business,” Chen said in a statement.
BlackBerry has stopped making its iconic smartphones. Instead, it's now focused on software like its QNX operating system for connected cars.
According to research firmGartner, just under 208,000 devices running BlackBerry OS were sold in the fourth quarter of 2016, bringing the once-leading smartphone brand to a position of near-total irrelevance.
This doesn't mean BlackBerry phones are gone for good though: Chinese manufacturer TCL is trying to revive the brand with new Android phones that keep the old-school aesthetic. One of those, the "Mercury," comes with afull QWERTY keyboard.
This chart fromStatistashows the steep drop of BlackBerry phones:
Reuters reporting by Ahmed Farhatha in Bengaluru.
Additional reporting by Jeff Dunn.