Quarterhill Inc. released its second-quarter earnings on August 6, reporting a dip well below $1M in licensing revenue as well as delays in its deal-making process due to COVID-19. While staying relatively quiet on the litigation front so far this year, Quarterhill did receive “a favorable update” during Q2 in its ongoing litigation against Apple, which brought the total final judgment in Wi-LAN Inc.’s favor to $108.98M USD.

This past week, Quarterhill Inc. announced its financial results for the three- and twelve-month periods ended December 31, 2019, reporting an increase of more than 280% in year-over-year patent licensing revenue. In Thursday’s earnings call, Board Chairman John Gillberry told investors that Quarterhill’s patent licensing business is “alive and well”, with patent deals signed in Q4 having increased the company’s cash balance of $68.6M (as of December 31, 2019) to “roughly $90M” (as of February 27).

Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) and Acacia Research Corporation reported their Q1 2017 earnings on May 4, both revealing year-over-year declines in revenue of more than 60 percent. The quarter’s dismal results come amid efforts by WiLAN and Acacia—historically, the two publicly traded NPEs most active in patent litigation among those tracked by RPX—to diversify their activities beyond patent assertion.

Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) has announced a seismic restructuring of its business model, de-emphasizing patent licensing and refocusing on the acquisition of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) businesses. Monday’s announcement follows a year in which WiLAN actively acquired patent portfolios from operating companies, including Eastman Kodak, GlobalFoundries, and Panasonic, boosting its patent portfolio to over 11,000 assets. It also comes after several other public NPEs, including Acacia Research Corporation and Unwired Planet (now Great Elm Capital Corp.) have made similar moves to diversify their activities.

On February 9, Wi-LAN, Inc. (WiLAN) announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year of 2016. The Canadian NPE reported net earnings of $8.6M for Q4, up from $3M during the same quarter last year. Quarterly revenue was $30.2M, compared to $26M during the same period in 2015. However, the company’s overall revenue for 2016 was $92.9M, down from $102.9M in the previous year.

In late October, the sole litigation campaign of Wi-LAN, Inc. (WiLAN) subsidiary IPA Technologies Inc. came to an abrupt halt when the NPE voluntarily dismissed, without prejudice, cases that it had filed two weeks earlier against Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Toshiba. Two patents (6,523,061; 6,742,021) from a family of nine generally related to speech recognition and operation of “electronic data sources” had been asserted against the defendants’ manufacture and sale of various desktop, laptop, and/or tablet computers that use Microsoft’s Windows 10 and include the company’s Cortana digital assistant. IPA has now rebooted the campaign with three new suits, one each against Alco Electronics (1:16-cv-01169), DISH Network (1:16-cv-01170), and HTC (1:16-cv-01171).

North Star Innovations Inc., a subsidiary of publicly traded NPE Wi-LAN, Inc. (WiLAN), has filed yet more cases asserting former Motorola patents, received from Freescale in a large October 2015 transaction. After dropping a case that asserted two such patents (5,961,373; 6,013,571) against Xilinx (1:16-cv-00773) in early September, North Star has filed a new suit against the company (1:16-cv-01182), alleging that Xilinx infringes a different patent (7,617,437). The ‘437 patent generally relates to error correction; Xilinx is accused of infringement through the provision of certain systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) that utilize error correction code (ECC) memory, including the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. North Star has also filed a new case against Seiko Epson (1:16-cv-01196), asserting a single patent (6,465,743), generally related to ball-grid array (BGA) chip packages, already at issue in earlier cases filed against ASE, Cypress Semiconductor, IDT, and TI.

Wi-LAN, Inc., through its subsidiary North Star Innovations Inc., has filed a second case against Toshiba (1:16-cv-01113) in 2016, again asserting patents (7,171,526; 7,573,416) received from Freescale in a much larger transfer in October 2015. In February of this year, North Star asserted other former Motorola/Freescale patents against Toshiba as part of a larger string of litigation that has now hit two dozen defendants, including Amazon, Canon, Fujitsu, HP, HTC, Microsoft, Sharp, and UMC, among others. The ‘526 patent generally relates to memory controllers and is asserted against Toshiba laptops (e.g. Protégé Z30 Ultrabook Laptop). The ‘416 patent generally relates to signal conversion with low power control and is asserted against Toshiba memory products (e.g. THGBX6T0T8LLFXF 15nm TLC 128 Gbit NAND Flash).

Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) subs North Star Innovations Inc. and Smart Wearable Technologies Inc. continue to add new defendants to their respective campaigns. On November 14, North Star filed suit against Integrated Device Technology (IDT) (8:16-cv-02055 ), accusing the company of infringing a group of patents acquired from Freescale. The accused products include various semiconductor memory devices. Also on November 14, Smart Wearable Technologies sued Fitbit (3:16-cv-00077) over a former Barron Associates patent. These latest suits follow WiLAN’s recent announcement of disappointing Q3 earnings.

In the third quarter of last year, Wi-LAN, Inc. joined Acacia Research Corporation to become one of the two most active publicly traded NPEs in patent litigation (among the over 20 publicly traded NPEs that RPX monitors). But while Acacia and WiLAN have continued to share that distinction over the past year, according to the NPEs’ recent earnings reports, they ended Q3 2016 with markedly different overall results.