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I always thought HTC and Samsung were exempt from these royalties by releasing their own Windows Phones. That's why Samsung doesn't care at all about their WP offerings.

Samsung, HTC, Apple and Nokia should account for over 50% of the global market. If my assumptions are correct, are the rest of the smaller players able to pay that much money on royalties alone?

I'll like to see some numbers. The article is seriously lacking data.

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> I always thought HTC and Samsung were exempt from these royalties by releasing their own Windows Phones

Samsung definitely pay a per-device royalty to Microsoft for Android devices, the latter even put a press release out about it a few years ago:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2011/sep11/09-28sa...

There are all sorts of creative accounting maneuvers that can be done in order to hide the amount exchanging hands for various purposes. They can be exempt and still pay and then to be reimbursed (or receiving a heavy discount somewhere else they buy Microsoft licenses. Samsung buys a lot of Windows licenses for their PC business.

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