Rambus Loses Money During First Quarter

It looks like a certain technology licensing company, known for the many lawsuits it had or has with various IT player, cannot exactly claim to have gone through the most stellar of financial quarters.

While Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are known for its central processing units (and graphics adapters in the case of the latter) and NVIDIA famous for its GPUs (to give a few examples of hardware developers), there are IT companies that got a so-called reputations through other means.

Basically, some companies, instead of actually making any sort of product, specialize in creating and holding intellectual property.

Rambus is one of those companies and has been involved in many a patent infringement lawsuit over the years.

In fact, there were periods when its finances took a boost because of settlements with actual product makers and developers.

Now, it seems that there was no such settlement during the first quarter of 2011, although the outfit did ink a deal with two companies and bought the patent portfolio of a different one.

Said deals are both five-year licensing agreements with Panasonic and Toshiba, while the company that sold Rambus its intellectual property was Imagine Designs Inc., which specialized in lighting and display technologies.

All in all, revenues only amounted to $62.5 million, which shows a sequential loss of 31% and enabled a net loss of $4.2 million.

In other words, the financial performance was nowhere near what Intel reported and even fell short by by quite a bit compared to what Advanced Micro Devices managed.

For those that haven't yet learned, Intel had its best financial quarter ever (again) while AMD, while it didn't see an actual rise in revenues, did make profits.

For the second quarter of 2011, Rambus expects $62-$66 million in revenues. It remains to be seen if the prediction is met.