The amount of revenue Sun receives as licensing fees seems to be a closely guarded secret. Their balance sheet lists only "Computer Products" as a gigantic lump sum of six billion a year. This includes everything except services including licensing fees. A few years ago analysts estimated licensing to run around $100 million or more, but that number must have increased substantially. For example, there are something like 150 million Java-enabled phones with Sun getting probably about 0.25 cents per phone plus VM licensing lump sums for a total of at least $40-50 million. Then one can painstakingly try to estimate how much Sun makes from each licensee. For example, BEA lists $130 million in licensing revenue and $4 million in licensing costs most or all of which probably goes to Sun. Web Sphere is an even bigger pie probably taking in $600-800 million every year with Java licensing on the order of $20 million.

Overall it would not be surprising if Sun was making as much as $200-250 million in licensing fees. Unfortunately this is small potatoes compared to the $6 billion in hardware sales. Even if as many as 400 million Java phones get created and Sun raises its fees (as it probably will) it is hard to see more than $400-500 million as an upper limit to annual licensing fees over the next few years.