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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: capt rocky 1 who wrote (51050)	8/24/2000 5:31:40 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi capt rocky 1; If Rambus really deserved royalties on SDRAM, why is it that the company hasn't collected royalties on the technology before this year? Note that the deals with Hitachi, Toshiba, and OKI did not involve royalties for shipments before this year. How did Rambus come to let all that money slip through their fingers? I know that the expected answer is that their patent didn't come through until this year. Okay. Does that mean that Rambus is particularly slow at getting patents through the patent office? So they started their SDRAM patent in 1990. Why didn't they collect any SDRAM money from it until 2000? Doesn't seem like good execution by an IP company to me. The amount of SDRAM produced from 1995 to 2000, is what, maybe 80 billion dollars. 1% of that would be a cool $800 million dollars. That's a lot of money for Rambus to have left on the table. How much would that be per share, and what would the share price of RMBS be now if they had got that money? It seems that the Rambus bull position has a bit of a paradox here. Rambus is an IP company, and does the best patents in the memory world. Rambus invented SDRAM. Yet Rambus, the very company that is supposed to be so good with patents, failed to collect on their SDRAM patents for at least 5 years. I would think that an independent, unbiased observer would have some doubts as to whether Rambus really invented SDRAM, or really is a highly capable IP company. Some part of the patent story just doesn't click. -- Carl