InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

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Licensing Deals Lead to Rise of Shares for InterDigital Communications



Mar 18, 2003 (The Philadelphia Inquirer - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- Shares of InterDigital Communications Corp. rose 42 percent yesterday after the King of Prussia company said it had reached licensing agreements with major cell-phone manufacturers that could produce a windfall of $360 million to $430 million in royalties over the next 12 months.

The agreements are "huge for this little company," said InterDigital spokesman Guy Hicks. In 2002, the company had net income of $2.4 million on revenue of $87.9 million.

The agreements with Ericsson Inc. and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, a joint cell-phone-making venture between Sony Corp. and Ericsson, ended a decade of patent-infringement lawsuits by and against InterDigital, which develops technology that connects cell phones to cell-phone towers.

InterDigital said in a release that the agreements also "establish the financial terms necessary to define the royalty obligations of Nokia Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd." under existing licenses with those cell-phone makers.

Hicks said the estimated $360 million to $430 million would come from retroactive fees from Ericsson and Sony dating back to the early 1990s through 2002, plus fees from Nokia and Samsung that were retroactive only from last year.

The agreements with all the manufacturers run through 2006, and they cover about 70 percent of all cell phones worldwide that run on second-generation GSM and TDMA technologies, the company said. The agreements do not cover phones that use so-called third-generation, or 3G, technology.

InterDigital was founded 30 years ago as International Mobile Machines. The company was renamed InterDigital in 1992. It employs 300 workers worldwide; about 130 are based in King of Prussia.

Its stock closed up $5.78 at $19.54 yesterday in trading on the Nasdaq exchange.


By Wendy Tanaka To see more of The Philadelphia Inquirer, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.philly.com(c) 2003, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune
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