ROL Group partners Kent Richardson and Erik Oliver have again been named in the IAM Strategy 300 – The World’s Leading IP Strategists.

“The IAM Strategy 300 is an annual list compiled by Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) Magazine that identifies individuals with an established track record in developing and rolling out world-class IP value creation programmes. To qualify for a listing in the IAM Strategy 300, a person must be nominated by others from outside of his or her own organization and have what IAM calls “exceptional skill sets, as well as profound insights into the development, creation, and management of IP value.”

This is the eighth year that Richardson has been named to the list and the seventh year that Oliver has been named to the list.

Erik and I wanted to thank our clients, team, friends and families for all the support over the last seven years. Thank you for helping the ROL Group to achieve important milestones:

• Helped our clients by and sell more than $65M in patent assets. We have sourced, filtered, diligenced, built financial models for, and closed deals for thousands of patents.
• Created the first data-driven report on the brokered patent market. We reported on who was selling patents, who was buying patents, what the prices were and how to improve your strategies. Now, we publish an annual report cited by others in the industry and academics.
• Built a database and operations to track and analyze patent deals in excess of $7B across more than 60,000 patents and 2,200 patent deals.
• Designed first of their kind tools for world-class technology companies to help them value, analyze, and process patent deals.
• Successfully negotiated away more than $500M in patent assertion liability.
• Helped governmental and quasi-governmental agencies implement new programs including their data protection policy, privacy policy, and IT licenses.
• Helped our clients find solutions to challenges in litigation, trademarks, licensing, patent monetization, and patent valuation.
• Developed an interesting and fun place to work.

We look forward to the next seven years and beyond. Thank you again!

Q3 Sales Rate Declines

Our Q3 sales analysis shows a slowing in patent purchases. The first half sales were 139% of 2014 sales, suggesting a big year for sales. Q3 shows a slowdown matching Q3 2014. We have seen Q3 slowdowns before, but this slowdown misses the first half 2015 sales boost.  In Q3, we saw 24 sales compared with 25 sales for the same period last year. Q4 will tell us whether the first half of 2015 was an anomaly.

At the ROL Group, we track the available and sold patent packages on the brokered patent market. Our proprietary database includes over 2,200 patent packages representing more than 60,000 patent assets and more than $7B in potential patent sales. We analyze the USPTO assignment database each quarter to identify sales of unsold packages from the past few years. 

Q3 2015 Quarterly Patent Market Report – ROL Group

Patent Sellers

Patent sellers continue to be primarily high technology companies and NPEs. The data does not show a strong corporate sellers preference to not sell to NPEs.

In Q3, sellers had greater success with portfolios having multiple assets. Although a couple larger transactions skewed the average to 33 assets per sold portfolio, there were few smaller packages; 25% of the packages had less than 5 assets. Anecdotally we have had brokers tell us that selling smaller packages is getting too difficult and that they continually seek larger patent packages to broker.

Sellers came from NPEs and corporates. With the split of HP, these may be the last sales we see as a unified company – it will be interesting to see how each new HP business pursues its own patent buying and selling path.

Q3 2015 Patent Sellers – ROL Group

Patent Buyers

Patent purchases split between corporations, defensive aggregators, and NPEs with Intellectual Ventures picking up the largest number of assets and at the top of the deal count list. Intel, Google and Sony all picked up patents this quarter. Absent from the list is Apple who appears not to be a significant buyer in the brokered patent market.

Q3 2015 Patent Buyers – ROL Group

Our analysis of the patent market is now available in the January/February (issue #75) of IAM Magazine. Here are some of the highlights:

• Asking prices are down ~$50K, but not by as much as you would have thought.
• The Alice decision has killed the sales rates (the percentage of packages sold) for business processes patents but has had much less of an effect on software patents.
• Patents with EOUs (light claim charts) have higher asking prices (+$50K) and selling rates.
• We sized the market at about $230M in closed patent transactions.

Additionally, we show the total asking price of deals we track has grown over time to almost $7B. The graph below includes both brokered and private deals in our database of over 2200 patent packages with over 64,000 patent assets.

Download the paper here.