Patently valuable
Carl Icahn - the billionaire activist investor and largest single owner of shares in Motorola Mobility - made an SEC filing suggesting Moto explore options for its patent portfolio, adding there may be "multiple ways to realize such value," according to Dow Jones Newswires. Short of just using the patents as they are, the other obvious way to realize value is to flog them.
The catalyst for such investor agitation is thought to have been the huge amount of money Apple and its new chums paid for the Nortel patents at a recent auction. If they were worth $4.5 billion than what what are Moto's thousands of patents worth? Bear in mind Moto's market cap isn't much more than that at $7.5 billion.
Moto issued a press release in response to the filing.
Motorola Mobility's Board of Directors and management team continuously reviews the Company's strategic direction and opportunities that it believes are in the best interests of the Company and all of its stockholders. Since Motorola Mobility became a new, independent public company in the first quarter of 2011, it has delivered innovative products and solid growth, including 22% revenue growth during its first quarter. Motorola Mobility has achieved these results, in part due to the fact that it has one of the strongest and most respected patent portfolios in the industry with over 17,000 patents and 7,500 pending.
While the market value for tech and telco patents is at a historical high right now, this is still a counter-intuitive suggestion from Icahn. Even if Moto got, say, $7 billion for the patents, it would then have to license them in order to keep making phones, and would have no protection from the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Having said that, Motorola Mobility shares jumped 16 percent yesterday on the news.
In other patent news, the Oracle/Google case rumbles on with the judge growing increasingly exasperated with the intransigence of the protagonists. "You're both asking for the moon and you should be more reasonable," said U.S. District Judge William Alsup, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile FOSS Patents reports that Google CEO Larry Page is going to have to take the stand to be questioned on the crux of the case - whether Google wilfully infringed Java patents in the development of Android.
