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Large Patent Portfolio Sales are Rare these days

You will remember Nortel Networks, and of course Motorola. If you’re an Intellectual Property professional, or an Engineer, you most probably will have heard of these companies at some point. They were behemoths of their times, but it’s notable that in recent years, these type of large Patent deals have become rarer and rarer.

  1. Nortel Networks (2011)
    • Sale Price: $4.5 billion
    • Buyers: A consortium including Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and others.
    • Details: Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company, auctioned off its portfolio of over 6,000 patents and patent applications, covering technologies in wireless, LTE, and data networking. This sale remains one of the largest patent transactions in history.  
  2. Motorola Mobility (2011)
    • Sale Price: $12.5 billion (including the entire company, with patents valued at around $5.5 billion)
    • Buyer: Google
    • Details: Google acquired Motorola Mobility primarily for its extensive patent portfolio, which included over 17,000 patents and 7,500 pending applications. These patents were critical in defending Android against intellectual property lawsuits.  
  3. Kodak (2012)
    • Sale Price: $525 million
    • Buyers: A consortium including Intellectual Ventures, Apple, Google, and others.
    • Details: Eastman Kodak, in financial distress, sold its digital imaging patent portfolio, which included over 1,100 patents related to capturing, processing, and sharing digital images.  
  4. Rockstar Consortium (2014)
    • Sale Price: $900 million
    • Buyer: RPX Corporation (on behalf of multiple companies, including Google and Cisco)
    • Details: The Rockstar Consortium, which originally included Apple, Microsoft, and others, sold a portfolio of over 4,000 patents originally acquired from Nortel. The patents covered networking, telecommunications, and other technologies.  
  5. BlackBerry (2018)
    • Sale Price: Undisclosed (estimated to be in the hundreds of millions)
    • Buyer: Huawei
    • Details: BlackBerry sold a portion of its patent portfolio, including patents related to smartphone technology, to Huawei. This was part of BlackBerry’s shift away from hardware to focus on software and services.  

These transactions are some of the largest IP transfer deals that have ever taken place. Minimally, they highlight the strategic importance of intellectual property in the tech industry, particularly for defensive and offensive purposes in competitive markets. However it’s notable that in recent years, we are not seeing many such deals taking place.