Rambus Makes Profits for Something Other than Lawsuits This Time

Rambus is one of the most infamous patent trolls out there, but it looks like, this once, it was able to rake in some profits without any settlement payments.

Rambus made the news quite a few times last year, and the years before, for how it got into patent litigations with a whole bunch of companies.

As such, it may have been a surprise to see a distinct lack of such court actions during 2011, not that other trolls didn't rear their heads, of course.

Regardless, the fact is that Rambus didn't get any lawsuit settlement payments recently, but that didn't stop it from making profits anyway.

After several quarters of less than stellar financial evolution, the company reported profits for the third one of the ongoing year (2011).

Granted, this didn't prevent the total revenue for the first nine months of the year from falling to $229 million (166 million Euro), 2% less than during the January-September period of 2010.

Nevertheless, the fact is that the licensing company made $100.3 million (72.72 million Euro) during the July-September period.

That is approximately 51% higher sequentially and a solid 216% on-year improvement, which is nothing to scoff at.

The net income wasn't too huge, at $0.5 million (0.36 million Euro, give or take), but still a long way from the $10.6 million loss of the second quarter.

Licensing deals were the reason behind all this, since they imply that Rambus receive monthly fees from all those that would use its patents.

The most lucrative of these were signed during Q2 and Q3 itself (the official announcement explains things in greater detail).

What remains is to see if the company can keep on going without starting yet another lawsuit, since one could say there are plenty of those to go around already (see the Samsung-Apple fight for more).