On 6 May 2020, ASX listed holding company QANTM IP Limited (ASX:QIP) announced that it has reached agreement to acquire the boutique Sydney-based IP firm Cotters Patent & Trade Mark Attorneys. The purchase price is A$6.3 million, paid in a combination of initial and deferred instalments. Cotters is a small firm that – according to the Register maintained by the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Board (TTIPAB) – currently comprises four registered patent attorneys and three registered trade marks attorneys. It is responsible for 272 Australian patent applications filed on behalf of clients during 2019. By way of comparison, to the extent that staff numbers and patent filings are any guide, when Watermark (now integrated into Griffith Hack) was acquired by Xenith IP Limited (now merged into IPH Limited) for approximately three times the price of Cotters, it had filed over five times the number of patent applications (1444) during the last full calendar year (2015) prior to the acquisition and employed around four times as many professional staff.
In the announcement, QANTM (and former Xenith IP) CEO Craig Dower is quoted as stating that:
The Cotters business is differentiated from our existing businesses in Australia – Davies Collison Cave and FPA Patent Attorneys – offering a fixed-price service model, and servicing a client base complementary to our existing practices. Cotters was founded just prior to the GFC, and survived and thrived through that difficult period. Cotters will be a positive addition to the QANTM Group.
Read the full announcement [PDF 405kB]. Read on below for a comparison of the patent filing profiles of Cotters, and the other two firms making up the QANTM Group, Davies Collison Cave (DCC) and FPA Patent Attorneys (FPA).
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