US Patent Transactions up Year-on-year, New AST Data Finds

IPR Daily

2022-03-01 09:58:30

The US saw 356 recorded patent transactions, involving 3,309 assets, 330 sellers and 297 buyers, during the fourth quarter of 2021, according to data compiled by AST.

Using USPTO assignment records and information gathered from numerous public sources, the defensive patent aggregator found that Software and Semiconductor were the leading categories in terms of number of assets in the secondary patent market.

Among AST’s other key Q4 findings are that:

There were 356 deals recorded in 475 assignments.
The largest deal of Q4 2021 was from Open Invention Networkto IBMfor 253 assets related to cloud computing and web services.
60% of transacted assets were acquired by operating companies.
54% of assets were related to software and semiconductors.
Among the 62 NPE buyers, 71% were active for the first time.

Furthermore, deal numbers for the whole of 2021 were slightly up on the 2020 amount, with 1,654 recorded for last year compared to 1,587 for the year before. However, these totals are subject to revision as further transactions may yet emerge on the USPTO database.

Aside from the OIN divestment to IBM, the biggest deal in Q4 saw Dominion Harbor acquire 242 wireless assets from NPE Inception Holdings.

Furthermore, 44 new NPEs bought 622 assets related to software, wireless and other domains. These included:

Awemane Ltd bought 232 software assets from IBM.
Highlands LLC bought 82 assets related to computing systems from Rambus.
Cloudrock LLC bought 48 cloud computing assets from Intellectual Ventures.
Atlantic IP Services Ltd bought 26 wireless assets from M L3Harris Technologies Inc & Others.
Array IP LLC purchased 22 electronic assets from NPE Golba LLC.
Daniel Opco LLC bought 21 industrial assets from Emerson Electric.
Steger IP LLC bought 15 semiconductor assets from Mediatek.

There were 57 litigations filed during Q4 following the reassignment of 43 assets. The top asset industries related to the 43 were Software (13), Wireless (13) and Electronics (10). Among the 56 operating companies targeted in the suits were Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, American Express, Foxconn, MasterCard, Nokia, Samsung, TSMC and Verizon.

Assets and deals by industry category

AST assigns the industry category for each deal using comprehensive analysis based on the asset’s title, technology area, class codes and sellers/buyers’ industry domains. In Q4 2021, 356 deals were recorded, with 23% of them relating to Industrials. Of all transacted assets, 38% were related to Software.

High tech domains such as Communications, Computing Systems, Electronics, Lighting, Semiconductors, Software and Wireless accounted for 80% of total transacted assets.

Seller and buyers by entity type and industry

Industrial companies, including Corning Inc, Snow Logic Inc and SKC Co Ltd, sold 207 assets in 42 deals.

Healthcare companies, including Carl Zeiss, Exo Imaging and Torque Therapeutic Inc, actively bought 438 assets in 64 deals.

Top deals

Five deals accounted for 35% of all assets acquired. As previously noted, the two biggest were the ones involving IBM and the OIN (253 software assets) and Dominion Harbor and Inception Holdings (242 wireless assets).

In the top 20 deals, eight subsequent litigations were filed in Q4. These involved nine assets asserted against companies including NEC Corp, NXP Semiconductor and Renesas Electronic Corp.

In Q4 of 2021, 37% of all assets were bought by NPEs and 71% of these were related to Software, Wireless and Electronics. Litigations are now being filed against operating companies working in the same domains. New NPEs bought 19% of all assets and it is likely that more litigations aimed at high-tech companies will begin in the coming quarters.