Spansion, the memory chip maker, embarked on a new litigious business model on Monday, but its moves against Samsung will not mean iPods being absent from retail shelves this Christmas.
The company said it was filing two separate patent infringement complaints in the US against the biggest memory chip maker, one in a Delaware court and the other with the International Trade Commission.
It wants the ITC to ban the import of more than 100m MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras and other consumer electronics devices containing Samsung’s allegedly infringing flash-memory chips.
The ITC will commit itself to a schedule where it could impose a final injunction banning such imports in 12 to 16 months, Bertrand Cambou, Spansion chief executive (pictured), and Boaz Eitan, executive vice president, told me.
Mr Eitan is also chief executive of Saifun Semiconductors, the Israeli company acquired by Spansion in March.
At the time, Mr Cambou intimated Spansion would be leveraging Saifun’s expertise in licensing and intellectual property rights in exploiting its own portfolio of more than 3,000 patents.
“Nobody believed us then, but we announced that Spansion was going to enter a large scale licensing business and we expected hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees,” the chief executive told me.
“This is a different company that you are going to see going forward and licensing is going to become big for us because of the strength of our IP,” he told me.
Spansion, a spin-off of a joint venture involving Fujitsu and AMD, is in dire need of new revenue streams. Flash memory prices for the industry have been collapsing, the company is servicing around $1.4bn in debt and analysts do not expect profitability before 2010.
Mr Cambou says Samsung firmly closed the door on licensing negotiations a year ago and Spansion has been building its case, with Saifun’s help, over the past nine months.
“This company is open for business negotiations at any time and we expect that Samsung is going to turn around and talk to us,” he said.
A Samsung spokeswoman issued a simple “No comment” later on Monday.
