InterDigital Plunges on Report of Lower-Than-Expected Bids
September 26, 2011, 5:18 PM EDTBy Ari Levy
(Updates patent portfolio in third paragraph.)
Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- InterDigital Inc., a technology company considering takeover offers, plunged 14 percent on the Nasdaq Stock Market after a report said bidders are offering $1 billion to $2 billion -- less than investors had expected.
“A large Asian mobile device company” has made a bid, DealReporter said today, citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter. A price of less than $2 billion would come in below InterDigital’s market value, which was $2.6 billion at the end of last week. It has now fallen to $2.3 billion.
The company, which owns about 1,300 patents related to mobile-phone technology, has said its intellectual property is more valuable than the patents auctioned off by Nortel Networks Corp. earlier this year. A group led by Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy that technology for $4.5 billion in July. Later that month, InterDigital hired Evercore Partners Inc. and Barclays Capital to review its options.
InterDigital fell $8.27 to $49.54 at 4 p.m. New York time, marking the biggest decline in almost two years. The drop pared the stock’s gain this year to 19 percent.
Jack Indekeu, a spokesman for King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based InterDigital, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
--With assistance from Doug MacMillan in San Francisco. Editors: Nick Turner, Jillian Ward
To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
