Nokia's patent as a weapon to aim at world market communications and networking. As Nokia now has only patents, no manufacturing, 'IP attackers' likely to turn into.
Nokia has recently sold its cell phone manufacturing division to Microsoft (MS). As Nokia now has only patents, no manufacturing, the company is much more likely to file lawsuits. For the purposes of this report we analyzed the IP activity of Nokia, including the patents it owns and the number of citations and as a result discovered the following implications.
It appears that Nokia will pursue a ‘patent privateering’ strategy.
The number of patent lawsuits directly filed by Nokia was greatly reduced in 2013. This was because Nokia adopted an IP strategy known as the patent privateering strategy, which is to carry out patent litigation through a proxy. To do this, Nokia transferred its patents to NPEs (patent trolls) through multiple paths and then utilized them for litigation with greater frequency.
Nokia built an extensive cell phone IP portfolio
Nokia owns a total of 6,443 patents related to cell phones. Among them, patent citations sharply increased recently in the areas of:
• transmission of digital information (1,452),
• wireless communications networks (904),
• electrical digital data processing (730),
• telephonic communication (513),
• transmission (486).
Many of these are highly likely to be used for patent litigation.
More than 3,000 global enterprises are exposed to Nokia patent dispute risk.
Nokia patents are cited by not only cell phone makers, but also communication service and equipment companies. In the top 11 technology groups exposed to the Nokia attack risk, a total of 3,475 companies cited a patent at least once in the past 10 years. ‘Patent citations’ is correlated with the ‘possibility of disputes.’
