China’s Oppo revealed as recipient of $4 million patent portfolio sold by Inventergy last year

New assignment records indicate that Chinese smartphone maker Oppo was the unidentified party that made a $4 million patent purchase from NPE Inventergy in June last year.

According to USPTO records, the Dongguan-based company obtained five US patents in separate assignments on 25th March this year (though these were not recorded with the USPTO until 7th September). The assignor of each of the patents was Golden Valley Holdings Limited, an entity with its address in Apia, Samoa – a well-known shell company coop.

Golden Valley was itself assigned four of these patents by Inventergy back on 23rd June 2015. This all but proves that these were among the two patent families that the US NPE sold for $4 million to an “undisclosed third party” two days later.

An Inventergy statement released at the time said that the two patent families are “relevant to the mobile communications infrastructure and mobile handset market segments” and “represent 3.3% of the 60 patent families, and 5.4% of the total patent assets originally acquired by Inventergy from Panasonic” – referring to a January 2014 partnering deal with the Japanese company. A search of USPTO assignments data confirms that each of the four US patents transferred to Oppo in March were originally owned by Panasonic.

The fifth patent that Golden Valley assigned to Oppo on 25th March had previously been owned by Intellectual Ventures, which had acquired it from Californian networking equipment maker IPWireless around the time it was bought by General Dynamics in 2012.

Interestingly, these are not the only patents that have been obtained by Oppo via the Golden Valley vehicle. In four separate assignments recorded on 21st September this year and executed on 21st June, Golden Valley transferred four US assets to the Chinese company that it had acquired from South Korean sovereign patent fund Intellectual Discovery (ID) back in April. These patents, which cover wireless telecommunications technologies, had originally been assigned to affiliates of Korean conglomerate Posco, and were transferred to ID by SeAH Networks in November 2010.

Golden Valley also acquired three US patents relating to mobile telecommunications from Korea’s SK Telecom in July. These have not been transferred on to Oppo at time of writing, but it would not be a surprise to see that happen in the near future.

Many IAM readers will probably not have heard of Oppo. However, the brand is certainly well-known within its native China; and during the second quarter of this year, it became the world’sfourth largest smartphone vendor with a 6.6% share of the global market, behind Samsung (22.4%), Apple (11.8%) and Huawei (9.4%). (The fifth largest vendor, Vivo, is another subsidiary of Oppo’s parent company BBK Electronics.) Moreover, Oppo recorded by far the most significant growth of any of the top vendors, with year-on-year change of 136.6% compared to compatriot Huawei’s 8.4%.

This exceptional growth has meant rapid entry into new geographic markets and, simultaneously, greater exposure to risks such as patent disputes. Filing alone cannot match the pace of expansion, so purchases of third-party patents can provide an efficient solution to these accompanying freedom-to-operate issues.

Oppo, of course, is not the only Chinese consumer tech company to have elected this strategy and ramped up its IP acquisition activity in recent years. Its competitor Xiaomi has also hit the headlines for making major patent purchases from Broadcom, Intel and Microsoft; BOE areHuawei are just a couple of the others that have also got in on the act. At a time when events in the United States are depressing patent values and restricting sales opportunities cross the board, China may offer some salvation for would-be sellers – and particularly some much-needed respite for under-the-cosh publicly traded NPEs like Inventergy.

The most recent issue of IAM features a deep-dive look at Chinese companies’ increasing appetite for US patent acquisitions, including analysis of some of the most significant deals that have been done. Subscribers can read the full article here.

From | IAM

Editor | Judy