Betty and Thread, thanks for the link on where ordinary computers are going. I just had a long phone call with Calderoni at SanDisk. Briefly:
1. Not very forthcoming with any hard facts on royalties. They currently get royalties from nine companies and have about 100 patents in their portfolio.
2. They have intentionally not made much detailed info available on their agreements with specific licensees. I told Calderoni that maybe if SNDK would provide more specifics in press releases, they would get fewer phone calls, emails, faxes, etc. from investors who want to know what's going on. He said he would consider it.
3. The project with Kaneb to produce the P-tag is still a very small part of the business, but Calderoni had no details on how many units had been produced, much less revenue stemming from this project.
4. Overall, this was not a very satisfying discussion. However, there was one policy issue that was interesting; namely, that SanDisk does not make uniform licensing and royalty agreements but tailors them to the individual companies. This is very different from the policy at QUALCOMM, where, no matter how many or how few patents are in a particular item being sold, the seller pays the same percentage royalty.
5. I told Calderoni it was difficult to evaluate a company with proprietary technology when the company doesn't want to reveal the extent to which that technology produces income from other companies. I would be very interested in any comments.
Art Bechhoefer |
