Stardate 20010713.1158 (On Screen): I try to keep my coverage of Rambus to a low level, but two stories about them have hit in the last day both of which are major bad news. (Heh-heh-heh...) Yesterday Rambus
announced its quarterly results and they were terrible, and the long term outlook is not good. Revenues are down, expenses (especially legal) are up, and the long term trend is for revenues to continue to decline and for legal expenses to rise.
And now it's been revealed that Rambus has renegotiated its contracts with some specific unrevealed RAM maker to reduce its royalty payments. This can't be good for the company, since royalties are its sole source of income. This would be in response to the legal decision in the Rambus versus Infineon suit that Infineon SDRAM did not infringe any of Rambus's patents, and also that Rambus had engaged in fraud to get those patents. As a result, Infineon will not have to pay Rambus royalties for SDRAM sales in the US. In that trial it came out that Samsung had a clause in its royalty agreement permitting its payments to be reduced to match those of any other competitor, and it's suspected that this agreement was with Samsung, but regardless it's going to ripple through to all the other licensees, and Rambus's royalties are going to take a dive. As I write this, RMBS is taking a beating on the NASDAQ. Of course, it's been taking a beating for a long time and its price curve looks like a Linux company, not like a real company which actually has a product to sell. (discuss)
