Thank you, Steve and good afternoon, everyone.
QTL fiscal third quarter revenues were $1.2 billion with earnings before tax as $854 million. As Steve mentioned, QTL fiscal third quarter results reflect non-payment of royalties on Apple products by Apple's contract manufacturers, as well as the non-payment of royalties by the licensee with which we have a dispute that was disclosed last quarter. During the fiscal second quarter, the licensee reported and paid only a portion of the royalties it owed under its license agreement and at that time, we expected the licensee to continue to report and pay sum, but not all of the royalties they owe for the fiscal third quarter. Although, we remain in discussions with this licensee in an effort to resolve the dispute, the licensee did not report or pay any royalties during the fiscal third quarter. This is a dispute as per the terms of the licensee's existing agreement that is similar to a number of the ones we have resolved in the past and we expect to be able to do that again here. With Apple's contract manufacturers refusing to fully report their total reported device sales for Apple products and the licensee with which we have a dispute also with holding reporting, we are not providing quarterly actuals or guidance for total reported device sales and related unit shipments and ASPs by our licensee. Because the significant portion of quarterly activity is not available and would not be included in those metric, making them incomplete in a limited value. We are however, providing quarterly QTL revenue guidance to help our investors model our expectations for the licensing business going forward.
Despite the near term impact of these items, which we believe we will be able to resolve over time to QTL financial performance it is important to note that 3G, 4G global sales and device trends remain very positive. For fiscal 2017, global 3G, 4G handset ASPs continue to track consistent with our prior expectations of low single digit percentage declines year-over-year. Global ASP trends continue to be strong this year with ASPs continuing to increase in China and for devices sold by Chinese OEMs globally. We also continue to see healthy growth in global device sales for the fiscal year, consistent with our longer term growth expectations of mid-single digit annual percentage increases. For calendar 2017 3G, 4G device shipments, we continue to estimate shipment of 1.75 billion to 1.85 billion devices globally, up approximately 6% year-over-year at the midpoint.
Our licensing and compliance initiatives remain on track and continue to bear fruit. Excluding the effect of the underreporting caused by the disputes with Apple and its contract manufacturers as well as the licensee I just described which we do not view as compliance issue. We estimate that the level of compliance by our licensees were sales during the March was in line with sales by our licensees during the December quarter. As you have seen from our recent announcements, we continue to actively pursue resolutions of the challenges to our licensing business that have been orchestrated by a few of the most profitable and powerful companies in the world. And to defend a well-established value of our patented technologies in the regulatory and other legal matters in which we are involved. And our appeal of the Korean FTC decision hearings were held last week in the Seoul High Court on our motion to say that remedial portion of the KFTC's order while we proceed with the appeal. We expect to get a decision on the request per se in the coming month. The U.S. FTC lawsuit is on track to be tried at the beginning of 2019. We look forward to demonstrating that many of the facts are wedged in the complaint are wrong. And the FTC's legal theories are without merit. As to the Taiwan FTC investigations, we continue to work to find a resolution and we are continuing to cooperate with the TFTC. We also continue to work through additional investigations in Europe. However, those investigations do not target Qualcomm's licensing business or practices. Finally as Steve mentioned, we have now filed patent infringement complaints against Apple with both the International Trade Commission and in Federal Court in the US.
The six patents are assorted in those actions enable high performance in a variety of areas of the smartphone while extending battery life. Each of the patents does so in a different way for different popular smartphone features. While the technologies covered by the patents are central for the performance of the iPhone including internal performance, graphics, higher data rates and network capacity, flashless boot and power management. The assorted patents are not essential to practice any standards in a mobile device or subject to a commitment to offer to license those patents.
We expect that the ITC investigation will commence in August and that the case will be tried next year. We expect the Federal Court case to trail the ITC action will be stayed pending the conclusion of the ITC act. This week we also filed two patent infringement lawsuits in Germany against the Apple seeking damages and injunctive relief for iPhones imported into or sold in Germany. The patents we are asserting in these cases represent two technologies important to iPhone functions. But again they are not standard essential patent and are not subject to end commitments to license those patent. Similar to the ITC process here in the US, we expect this litigation in Germany will move on a fairly fast timeline with an outcome likely in approximately 12 months.
In addition, we have filed a motion asking the Federal Court in San Diego to require Apple's contract manufacturers to comply with the terms of their license agreement with respect to Apple product, while the various cases are heard. Before it instructed its contract manufacturers to stop paying royalties to Qualcomm, Apple had been indirectly paying royalties on its products based on the contract manufacturer agreement for 10 years. Nothing has changed Apple continues to generate substantial profit by using our technology in the contract manufacturer agreement remain valid. There will be a hearing on that motion in mid-August. Yesterday, Apple's contract manufacturers responded to our claims against them and the motion I just described. In addition Apple start to oppose our motion in the contract manufacturer cases, as well as to consolidate the contract manufacturer cases with the Apple cases. These filings by Apple and its contract manufacturers prove what we have been saying all along. Apple has interfered with our license agreement with its contract manufacturers by instructing them not to pay the royalties they owe for sales of apple product and then agreed to indemnify and protect the contract manufacturers against any damages and payments they would owe to Qualcomm as a result of Apple instructing them to breach their license agreement. It is clear that Apple is controlling all of the contract manufacturers' statement and actions in the litigation. If Apple hadn't interfered with the licenses and instructed the contract manufacturers to take these actions, the contract manufacturers would not be contesting the licenses now. It is important to remember that in most cases our license agreements were negotiated and entered into with the contract manufacturers before Apple ever entered the smartphone market.
And then Apple decided to rely on them for a decade, before now trying to disrupt them. One of Apple's claims has been that this is just a dispute about how much they should pay for using our valuable intellectual property and that they have stopped paying because, they don't know how much to pay us. This is quite obviously wrong. As I just explained the long standing and valid contract manufacturer licenses clearly specify the royalties that are due and payable on Apple products, yet Apple is interfering with those contracts. Further, we have made several offers to Apple to have an independent third-party result of parties best agreement over the value of Qualcomm's technology and set the royalty terms of a direct license between Qualcomm and Apple once in for all. Apple has refused those offers each time, which shows they are more interested in pursuing the strategy the way rather than good paid resolution. We will continue to vigorously defend the value of our innovation and our pro-competitive business model.
Turning to our datacenter business, we remain on track for commercial shipments of the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor family by the end of the calendar year and we have already shipped more than 1000 evaluation platforms to leading customers and partners. We continue to be very encouraged by the engagement with and feedback from a variety of our growing list of customers and partners as to the performance of our product. In parallel, we are working hard to continue to build the datacenter ecosystem for Centriq-based server. This quarter we announced the collaboration with Packet a leading bare metal cloud provider to deliver a consumable cloud platform based on the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor for access by the software development community. We demonstrated with Canonical a highly scalable OpenStack NFV infrastructure running on a Qualcomm Centriq 2400 platform. And we announced the collaboration with MariaDB to implement MariaDB's enterprise grade, database architecture on the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor to drive performance and compute that scale. That concludes my comments. And I will now turn the call over to George.