SAN JOSE, Calif. — Qualcomm charges a 5% royalty, or about $12 to $20, per smartphone plus a large “CDMA tax,” Apple’s chief operating officer testified in an antitrust case here. The testimony put on the record some details of Qualcomm’s licensing practices that have long drawn industry complaints.

Apple struck a deal with Qualcomm in 2007 to set royalties on iPhones at $7.50 per handset. In 2011, the two struck a deal to keep royalties at the same level while giving Qualcomm “short-term” exclusivity as the iPhone’s cellular baseband supplier.

The “7.50 [royalty] may not sound like a lot, but it [amounted to] billions of dollars a year,” said Jeff Williams, who led the first iPhone team and is now Apple’s COO. “It is not FRAND, in our view, compared to everyone else … Qualcomm charged more than everyone else together.”

“The alternative was that it defaults to the contract manufacturer’s rate of $17 to $18 [per phone, and] if we pursued them legally, we wouldn’t have access to chips … [and] risk getting our brand-new iPhone enjoined,” said Williams, adding, “Qualcomm represented [$7.50] as the average price paid.”

Although patent licensing at the handset level has become widely used, Apple found it unfair.

“We led the charge to add a lot of NAND memory” in handsets, but “if we put an extra $100 in NAND, they would get $5 of that even though they didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. Apple spends “an extra $60 in stainless steel enclosures, and Qualcomm would collect an extra $3 — that didn’t make sense to us, and it still doesn’t today,” he added.

The original $7.50 royalty “didn’t apply to CDMA phones or iPads,” said Williams, later calling licensing terms for the cellular protocol that Qualcomm developed “roughly a $250 million CDMA tax.”

Apple initially proposed that it pay $1.50 per baseband chip used. Under the final deal, Apple’s contract manufacturers paid Qualcomm its usual 5% handset royalty under their existing patent licenses, Apple reimbursed them, and Qualcomm reimbursed Apple. Apple avoided striking a patent deal directly with Qualcomm under the arrangement.