Judge Henry Morgan of the U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia ordered Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) on Monday to pay £1.47 billion to Centripetal Networks Inc for patents infringement.
Cisco still performed fairly upbeat in the stock market on Tuesday and closed the regular session close to 1.5% up. Including the price action, shares of the company are now trading at £30.19 versus £37.42 per share at the start of 2020. In March, Cisco slid to a lower £25.66 per share due to COVID-19 disruptions. Here’s what you need to know about value investing strategy.
Cisco to appeal in the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals
Centripetal had accused Cisco of violating five of its patents. According to the non-jury trial that lasted for about a month, there was substantial evidence that Cisco violated four of these. Cisco acquired PortShift last week to expand its footprint in DevOps and Kubernetes security.
The U.S. court valued actual damages to be paid to Centripetal at £584.12 million but multiplied it by 2.5 citing Cisco’s conduct that it called willful and egregious. In the ruling, Morgan said:
“Cisco did not advance any objectively reasonable defences at trial. The infringing functionality was added to their accused products post June 20, 2017, and resulted in a dramatic increase in sales which Cisco touted in both technical and marketing documents.”
Cisco, however, expressed disappointment in the decision on Monday. The company said its innovations predated Centripetal’s patents by several years. Cisco expressed confidence that it had sufficient evidence of invalidity and non-infringement as it revealed plans of appealing in the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
