Kodak will receive far less than the estimated $2.6 billion for a portfolio of 1,100 patents.
A court approved the purchase to a consortium that includes industry heavy weights such as Apple, Google, Samsung, RIM, Amazon, Fujifilm, Adobe, HTC, Huawei, Shutterfly, Facebook and Microsoft for a total of $527 million. The majority of the patents - a chunk of 700 documents - refer to related to digital camera LCD viewfinders, and 400 patents are related to image capture and manipulation and network-based services.
The purchase price was described as "disappointing" by judge Allan Gropper, who green-lighted the sale to allow Kodak to conclude its bankruptcy proceedings. For the consortium, the patent acquisition could be considered a bargain, given the potential damage that could have been caused, if the patents had fallen into the hands of a patent troll, which are growing stronger through their license deals.
From the buyer's perspective, however, the Kodak patents were rather expensive. At about $477,000 per patent, Google paid twice as much per patent that the amount it paid for the average Motorola patent.
"With the Court's approval of the sale of our digital imaging patent portfolio, we have achieved one of Kodak's key restructuring objectives, while positioning our Commercial Imaging business for further growth and success, and enabling Kodak to repay a substantial amount of its initial lending," Kodak said in a statement. The company aims to use the funds to provide its business with a fresh start.
Its sad to hear that was once a globally renowned company for 130 years, suddenly took its downturn...
Its sad to hear that was once a globally renowned company for 130 years, suddenly took its downturn...
Kodak was actually the first photo company to change with the times. Kodak made the first digital camera in 1975. By the early 1990s they had a line of >1 MP DSLRs (modified Canon and Nikon bodies with a Kodak sensor) costing $13k-$30k which they marketed to press photographers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS
To give you an idea how far ahead they were, in 1994 my lab bought an Apple Quicktake 100. That was 0.3 MP. It nearly 5 years before consumer digital cameras hit 1 MP, a mark Kodak had already surpassed in 1991. And the first non-Kodak DSLR was the Canon 30D in 2000.
Most of the early work on digital camera sensors and imaging technology was entirely Kodak's doing. Their problem was that after a certain point, it's dirt cheap and simple to make a sensor. It's not like a CPU where you have to design each transistor. With a sensor you design one pixel, and repeat it a several million times.
Consequently, the companies which dominate the digital camera market today are ones with strong backgrounds in optics and bodies. Those are still hard to make (or rather, make well), and that's where the money is at. Unlike film, which was a consumable; you only need to buy one digital sensor per camera. That doomed Kodak since they didn't make bodies (unless you count their disposables or cheap disc or 110 cameras).