Apple and Google, rivals both in the open market and in courtrooms, have displayed a rare show of unity when they came together to jointly bid for the acquisition of Eastman Kodak's 1,000 imaging patents for more than $500 million, a Bloomberg report said.
Citing two unnamed people with knowledge of the situation, the report said there were two teams when the bidding started initially. The Apple-led group included Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures Management LLC as of this summer and the Google consortium pursuing Kodak's patents included patent aggregation firm RPX Corp. and Asian manufacturers of Google's Android phones. It was speculated that HTC and Samsung were part of Google's team initially.
The 132-year-old photography pioneer had filed for bankruptcy earlier this year showing $5.1 billion in assets and $6.75 billion in debt. Kodak estimates the value of its portfolio to be between $2.2 and $2.6 billion; however, the first rounds of bids were in the range of $150 million to $250 million. Kodak has to sell the patents to repay a $950 million loan from Citigroup and expects to exit bankruptcy in 2013. According to an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal, a consortium had offered more than $500 million for Kodak's digital patents.
The unlikely partnerships for patents are not unusual in the world of technology. Back in 2011, a consortium of tech giants compromising Apple, Microsoft, EMC, Ericsson, Sony, and Research In Motion bought some 6,000 patents and patent applications from Nortel Networks for $4.5 billion.
The Apple-Google joint move excites many in the industry as the technology titans had fought it out in courts over certain patent claims and many are still pending in open courts. Talking to the Wall Street Journal, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt had recently compared the relationship between the two companies to that of U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. "The press would like to write the sort of teenage model of competition, which is, 'I have a gun, you have a gun, who shoots first?," he said during the interview. "The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other. I think both Tim [Cook, Apple's CEO] and Larry [Page, Google's CEO] have an understanding of this state model. When they and their teams meet, they have just a long list of things to talk about," he said.
