CEO decision to stay is best bit of news in momentous year for WiLAN

Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard not to see the announcement yesterday that Jim Skippen will stay on as CEO of WiLAN as anything other than very good news for the NPE. Skippen announced earlier this year that he was going to step down but such is the state of flux and uncertainty both in WiLAN’s business and the licensing market in general, that now is not the time to see a change at the top. Plus, there’s not exactly a deep pool of potential leaders to choose from who have the kind of experience to keep an NPE like WiLAN heading in the right direction.

This is proving something of a transformational year for the Canadian company. As well as announcing that Skippen would be staying on for another three years, WiLAN also revealed that it was acquiring around 3,300 patents from Freescale Semiconductor. In what looks like a classic privateering type deal, Freescale will receive the bulk of its cash for the portfolio from future licensing revenues.

After WiLAN acquired the former Qimonda portfolio, which totaled 7000 patents, from Infineon Technologies in June for $30m, the Freescale deal means that the NPE has now added over 10,000 patents to its portfolio in five months. Commenting on the acquired patents on a call with investors, Skippen said: “These technologies relate to forward searches, memory, semiconductor packaging, wireless and the Internet of Things, among others. We’ve already documented over 77 examples of patent use in various companies’ products and believe this portfolio will be a key driver for revenues in the future.”

The news of Skippen’s decision to stay on and the Freescale purchase came as the company announced its results for the third quarter and it was by no means all good news. In order to reduce overhead WiLAN announced a series of cost-cutting measures designed to cut operating expenses by between $8 million and $10 million per year. The restructuring will affect approximately 30% of the workforce and will also result in WiLAN spinning out its R&D unit, although it will retain a minority interest.

Given that Skippen admitted in an interview with this blog back in September that they were looking at ways of diversifying the business, the announcement about the R&D unit certainly comes as something of a surprise. The business may look to diversify in other ways but for now the focus is on being a pure-play licensing business, navigating what remains a very challenging market and acquiring further high quality patents. Skippen’s U-turn on his departure will certainly help WiLAN’s chances of success.

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