Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million to use Windows Phone in Q4 2011

As part of Nokia’s quarterly financial report for the last three months of 2011, it has been revealed that the company received a “platform support payment” of $250 million from Microsoft. While acknowledging that it pays royalty fees to Microsoft itself, Nokia notes that this is the first of multiple such payments from Microsoft. Over the course of the strategic agreement arranged between the two companies, the total value of royalties going in one direction and platform support payments going in the other is “expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars.” If $250 million is the set quarterly rate at which Microsoft will support Nokia, that will mean a cool $1 billion in annual income for the Finnish company just for choosing to make Windows Phone its primary smartphone OS.