BlackBerry’s ‘legacy’ mobile patents just sold for a staggering $600 million
BlackBerry has sold its remaining cache of mobile-related patents to a consortium of companies under the name Catapult IP Innovations Inc. for a princely sum of $600 million. The company largely exited the mobile business in 2017 after failing to turn itsPriv slider— and a pivot to Android — into a sustainable source of revenue. Aftershutting down its legacy BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 servicesin early January, it is now ridding itself of the last vestiges of what made it a mobile powerhouse between 1998 and 2011, when it dominated the market with its keyboard-first smartphones.
According to apress release, the deal sees Catapult buying “substantially all of its non-core patent assets…relat[ing] primarily to mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking.” BlackBerry is clear in the release that the “transaction will not impact customers’ use of any of BlackBerry’s products, solutions or services,” which is not surprising.
Over a decade ago, a consortium of companies representing Microsoft, Ericsson, BlackBerry, Sony, Apple, and others spent over $4.5 billion to buy up Nortel’s mobile patents, another Canadian company that had a massive impact on the early days of mobile computing. The consortium, which was known as Rockstar, then turned around and used the patents to sue Google, Samsung, ZTE, LG, HTC, and other Android manufacturers over disputed IP used within Android. A deal was reached with Google in November 2014, and a month later Rockstar sold most of the affected patents for just under a billion dollars, distributing the rest between the parties.
BlackBerry’s direct-to-consumer mobile ambitions are long behind it, focusing these days instead on enterprise security, mobile device management, software for autonomous vehicles, and IoT. The stock hasn’t done much since it bottomed out in 2012, though in May 2021, during the height of the Gamestop meme stock frenzy, it very briefly shot up from just under $9 a share to $20 before coming back down to earth in July. The stock currently trades at just over $8 a share.
Why is this important to people reading about Android? Because BlackBerry’s name is still ostensibly available to mobile manufacturers; after TCL released four phones under the BlackBerry Mobile name between 2017 and 2020, it released its rights to the name, and BlackBerry subsequently sold the license to Onward Mobility, which announced a newkeyboard-bedazzled BlackBerry phonein mid-2020, passing its2021 deadlinewith nary a peep. The tiny company, however,resurfaced earlier this yearsaying that while “various delays that prevented us from shipping in 2021, we will be providing more regular updates starting this month that will clarify and answer many of your questions about the ultra-secure 5G enterprise smartphone (still with a keyboard!) we’re bringing to market.”
There’s no word as to how Catapult plans to leverage its new patent portfolio — whether it will act responsibly or pursue litigation like so many other patent trolls — but at least BlackBerry, which has been limping along for the past decade, now has an extra $450 million in cash ($150 million will be paid later in $30 million installments) to play with.
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