Ongoing M&A activity drives significant shifts in The Patent Board Telecommunications Scorecard

Ongoing M&A activity drives significant shifts in The Patent Board Telecommunications Scorecard
5/19/2009 12:16:09 PM

The ongoing consolidation in the Telecommunications industry is driving significant changes to the rankings on The Patent Board’s annual Patent Scorecard. The announced AT&T/BellSouth and Alcatel/Lucent mergers illustrate the ongoing consolidation trend in telecommunications. As standalone companies, Lucent and Alcatel ranked #6 and #12 while AT&T and BellSouth ranked #8 and #11 respectively from a Technology Strength™ perspective. The combined companies would be in a virtual tie for 3rd place behind Siemens, ranked #1 and #2 Cisco Systems.

The Patent Board’s data lists the Alcatel/Lucent merger as the largest merger of US patent portfolios in history. The combined company will have almost 15,000 US patents making it a larger deal from a patent perspective than other recent deals like HP/Compaq, Konica/Minolta, and Pfizer/Pharmacia.

The proposed merger of AT&T and BellSouth follows the closed merger between AT&T and SBC. In 1984, the Bell System was broken up into 7 “Baby Bells.” 22 years later, merger activity is bringing the Baby Bells back together. After the AT&T/BellSouth merger, only 3 of the 7 Baby Bells will remain: AT&T, Qwest, and Verizon. It is hard to imagine how different the telecommunications industry would be if the 1984 divestiture of AT&T did not occur. If all the pieces of the old AT&T were put back together it would be #1 on the Telecommunications Patent Scorecard with a massive portfolio of over 30,000 active US patents. The old AT&T would have the 4th largest portfolio of US patents behind IBM, Canon, and Hitachi.

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