Canadian vendor Nortel Networks has completed the sale of its patent portfolio to a consortium of tech giants for US$4.5bn. The winning consortium is composed of Apple, data provider EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, RIM and Sony. Nortel said that the patent…
Canadian vendor Nortel Networks has completed the sale of its patent portfolio to a consortium of tech giants for US$4.5bn.
The winning consortium is composed of Apple, data provider EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, RIM and Sony.
Nortel said that the patent portfolio contained over 6,000 patents and patent applications that covered multiple areas, including wireless 4G technology, data networking and semiconductors.
“The extensive patent portfolio touches nearly every aspect of telecommunications and additional markets as well, including Internet search and social networking,” it said in a statement.
Nortel said that it did not expect that the company’s common shareholders or the NNL preferred shareholders will receive any of Nortel’s creditor protection proceedings and that it expects that the proceedings will result in the cancellation of those equity interests.
Nortel first initiated creditor protection proceedings in January 2009 under the Canadian Companies Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) in Canada and Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code in the US.
Since then, it has sold off large parts of the business, including the sale of substantially all of its CDMA business and LTE assets in North America to Ericsson.
Google also made a US$900m stalking horse bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio. The US publication Forbes reported today that Google had acquired approximately 1,000 pending and issued patents from IBM. Google did not answer questions on this acquisition.