Advisory Services
ipVA acts on both sell side and buy side of M&A diligence.
Are you sure that your company’s IP position is as strong as possible on exit? Are your IP assets of sufficient and demonstrable quality? What do you know about the threats to your products from competitors who may be motivated to attack you before exit?
On sell side, our role is to prepare the company for sale or IPO. Using our IP Optimisation™ and IP Presentation™ tools and methodologies we seek to position the IP for exit and exit diligence. The target is to put the IP Assets in play – creating demonstrable evidence of quality and valuation – and to understand how IP Risks can be best explained as part of a rigorous diligence process.
Our sell side role also involves IP contingency planning against the threat of an infringement action being taken just before an exit transaction. This is a time of high vulnerability for a company, and as a result, competitors and licensing organisations can use the opportunity to allege infringement either to interrupt IPO and new funding being raised by a competitor or to extract a financial settlement. European companies that have lived through this tactic such as Wolfson and Esmertec can explain the disruptive effect of an infringement action at this sensitive time.
ipVA creates strategies to manage these threats and story boards to allow their context and threat level to the business to be understood and intelligently presented.
Are the IP Assets being acquired as part of an M&A transaction of high quality and do they support the price being paid? Are you acquiring or obtaining rights to all the IP Assets that you will need to operate the business? What is the target’s IP strategy and is there hidden value (or risk) to take into account?
How has the target company managed the threats from its competitors and other holders of IP rights and how much IP risk are you taking on? Where should the risk transfer point take place?
On the buy side we seek to answer these questions. ipVA’s M&A buy side diligence and IP Clarity™ reporting provides quantified (not qualitative) answers to these questions.
ipVA’s IP Audit methodology and reporting also identifies all categories of IP that exist in a business, creating an identified inventory that can be added to any transfer documents