I laughed at MSD's Patent sale NRin the FP.
Its so ridiculous, this patent sale. Here Lindgren says out of one side of his mouth that it will be no trouble at all to monetize the CORE patents.
Then in the news release, his IR guy Mike Salter says:
"It takes a tremendous amount of work to assert a patent so the idea is you are a 60 person company and you make decisions on which patents you have with the best possibility of raising revenue and then you put a lot of time and company resources into establishing licensing programs.|
So here MSD finagles these 2000 or so patents out of Nokia Msft and proposes that it will be easy to monetize them at minimal cost. Question arises then first how many patents did they just sell for 11 million dollars, then next question is if it cost so little to monetize the patents that they obtained, why would it cost so much more to monetize the ones that they just sold.
I suspect that the patents involved in the recent sale are valuable and would have been much more so in the hands of Win.
Just by way of a hypothesis, if the current patents actually held by MSD amount to 2500 and the Co is valued at say 500 million less the funds they have in the bank so about 380 mill then the number of patents sold could be 11/380 of the 25oo that MSD holds or roughly 72 patents. Could be more, likely, because these patents are not that important by MSD's own indiciations, at least important to them.
So if they can monetize an additional 2000 patents from Nokia, why can't they monetize this extra 72 or 100 patents?.
Patents = Gold and I have said so many times before and been proven to be correct. If the deal goes through, these patents would revert to WI Lan in any contested scenario in my view and the MSD BOD may incur a rap on the knuckles for engineering such a deal at this time. I would love to see WIN's opinion on the patents that were sold as to their view of monetization possibilities. I suppose we will find out soon enough.