“It is pretty common in auctions because you are trying to get together people who have reached their individual limits and they still have interest in the assets.Vinted and Depop have become a viral sensation with Generation Z shoppers looking to thrift second-hand clothing from the comfort of the sofa. “When people drop out, you try to partner people,” another source said. On Tuesday night, the Ericsson consortium stopped bidding, and started looking for a partner, which it found in Apple, the source said.
The auction tested the limits of even the giants, and it took behind-the-scenes maneuvering and a series of alignments for a winner to emerge. “Clearly at a price at this level it had to be strategic, and they could afford that.”
“It did become clear to us very quickly that this was something that a bunch of big companies with humongous balance sheets had decided was strategic for them,” RPX Chief Executive John Amster said. The consortium remained on the sidelines looking to partner with someone else but never did, the source said. The RPX-led consortium, which included Chinese firm Huawei, dropped out after the first round of the auction held at the offices of law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Intel started the bidding around 9 am on Monday with a $1.5 billion bid, one source said.
FIVE BIDDERSįive parties, including two consortiums, initially started bidding for the bankrupt Canadian telecoms company’s patents - Apple, Intel, Google, a consortium of Ericsson, RIM, Microsoft, Sony and EMC, and a group led by patent risk solutions provider RPX, the sources said. The Internet company might have had $36.7 billion in cash as of March 31, but it was only willing to go up to $4 billion for these patents, one person said. But the auction that started on Monday and saw 20 rounds of bids over four long days ultimately hit a price that became too much even for Google, the sources said. Google had been expected to emerge victorious after it set a $900 million stalking horse bid in April.
The final figure was three times the amount expected by some analysts - a sign of the lengths to which Google’s rivals were willing to go to get their hands on the treasure trove of wireless technology, and thwart the Internet powerhouse’s mobile ambitions. Whatever its reasons, Google’s shenanigans did not work.Ī group of six companies - Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony - won the auction of 6,000 Nortel patents and patent applications with a $4.5 billion bid. It was not clear what strategy Google was employing, whether it wanted to confuse rival bidders, intimidate them, or simply express the irreverence that is part and parcel of its corporate persona. “Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.” One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,” the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion. “It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. “Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said. Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun’s constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday. People walk past a logo next to the main entrance of the Google building in Zurich March 9, 2011.