“Patents are becoming so valuable that Apple Inc. and Google Inc. may have to pay a 50 percent premium to buy InterDigital Inc., even after a decision to put itself up for sale sparked a 72 percent jump in the stock,” Danielle Kucera, Zachary Tracer and Rita Nazareth report for Bloomberg.
“InterDigital, whose engineers invented some of the technology for high-speed mobile phone networks now used by the world’s biggest handset makers, has gained $1.4 billion since saying last week it hired banks to explore options including a sale,” Kucera, Tracer and Nazareth report. “The $3.2 billion company, based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, may cost more than $5 billion, Algorithm Capital and Dougherty & Co. said. That would be the most expensive deal in the wireless equipment industry relative to earnings in more than a decade, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.”
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Kucera, Tracer and Nazareth report, “Apple and Google are vying to obtain exclusive rights to the inventions used in almost every device from the iPhone to Google’s Android-based handsets and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM)’s Blackberry as smartphone demand is forecast to more than double by 2015. Owners of InterDigital, worth just $1.2 billion a year ago, now stand to profit from the company’s 8,800 patents after Google lost a bidding contest last month for bankrupt Nortel Networks’ licenses. A group including Apple agreed to pay $4.5 billion — a fivefold increase from Google’s initial bid.”
“About 15 percent of InterDigital’s patents are related to mobile-phone technologies used to transfer information,” Kucera, Tracer and Nazareth report. “They may be worth more than those Nortel auctioned in June because it has more fourth-generation wireless technology patents, Charlie Anderson, a Minneapolis-based analyst at Dougherty, said in a telephone interview. Parts of its portfolio also haven’t been licensed, leaving more control to the buyer, he said… Apple and Google are among the companies weighing bids for InterDigital, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, who declined to be identified because the matter is private.”
Much more in the full article here.
Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents, “One week after putting itself formally on the selling block in the current mobile patent buying frenzy, mobile patent holding and research company InterDigital LLC today announced an ITC complaint and a companion (mirror) federal lawsuit in the District of Delaware against Nokia (with which InterDigital is still embroiled in litigation that started years ago) as well as Chinese device makers Huawei and ZTE.”
“Having looked at the complaint, I believe that InterDigital wants to demonstrate that it holds patents that it declares essential to a host of 3G-related standards,” Mueller reports. “This approach would make sense for InterDigital with a view to the objective of signing license deals with the defendants, but in the current situation the complaint may also be a statement directed at potential acquirers.”
Much more, including the asserted patents, accused products, and the standards to which the patents-in-suit are allegedly essential, in the full article here.
Related articles:
In wake of Nortel patent auction loss, Google general counsel calls for patent reform – July 26, 2011
Apple paying more than half $4.5 billion price tag on Nortel patent trove – July 22, 2011
Apple, Google gird for bidding war over InterDigital patent trove – July 20, 2011