Portfolio Sales

,

Toronto Globe reports on Unified's in-depth portfolio analysis of Blackberry and its delayed sale to NPE

,

At the beginning of 2022, BlackBerry announced that Catapult IP Innovations Inc. had agreed to buy several patents in a deal worth over $400-million dollars, but by June, the deal was off. Unified’s Director of Analytics, Sam Baird, analyzed the potential value of the divested portfolio of 37,175 patents, which would be one of the largest patent deals in the past decade. Mr. Baird has noted the buyer’s cost could exceed $900 million USD, including related maintenance costs, prosecution fees and litigation costs.

Catapulting BlackBerry: A Data-Intensive Look – Part I, Quantity

Unified’s Samuel Baird pens a two-part series that examines the completed sale of the Blackberry portfolio. The first part was published by IPWatchdog.com on May 18, 2022.

At the end of January, BlackBerry announced it had completed the sale of the majority of its patents to Catapult IP Innovations, a special purpose vehicle specifically formed for the acquisition. Approvals for the transaction were granted under the 1985 Investment Canada Act and the 1976 Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act. The value of the deal was reported to be $600 million, a figure that makes it one of the largest patent acquisitions in the last ten years and spurs a great deal of speculation about whether it is worth it. This article explores Blackberry’s divested portfolio and disassembles some of the assumptions surrounding the portfolio and the deal’s value.

Click HERE to read the entire article posted on IPWatchdog.com. In Part II of this two-part series, we will examine some of the data around quality and essentiality of the Blackberry portfolio.