BTG Plc, the London-based intellectual property group, makes money from technology – any technology. A company whose operations cover biotechnology, vehicle transmission systems, hip replacement products, liquid crystal display technology and flash memory devices may seem a strange creature for those familiar with traditional, narrowly focused operations. But BTG is narrowly focused in the sense that its core business is acquiring intellectual property and making as much money from it as possible. It follows that the company’s great skill is patents and making sure they are applied in the most effective way. BTG trawls through 700-800 technologies from companies and universities every year and selects about 100 of them for commercial exploitation. One group of patents highlighted by BTG’s report are a group of flash memory patents developed by US semiconductor veteran Gerald Banks. They relate to multi-level storage that can vastly increase capacity by storing multiple bits per memory cell. Under existing technology, each memory cell stores one bit of information. BTG’s semiconductor expert Anthony Berry says that once you have solved the problem of going from one bit to two, you have also cracked the technology of going from two to eight. This, he reckons, is about the limit at present though it future it may go to 16 and 32. Intel Corp and Sandisk Corp have both recently launched products based on their own versions of this technology. For any rival that wants to leap into the market, BTG’s patents offer an immediately opportunity. Berry has just returned from a trip to the US talking to potential users of the patents. He says he has received a cash offer from an unnamed company, which is under consideration. Another technology where BTG sees enormous potential is radio frequency identification RFID devices where it already counts Seika Corp and BISTAR Group as licensees. Information of the kind contained in barcodes can be written to and received from chips remotely. At present the chips cost around $1 each – restricting their use to expensive items. But BTG believes that growing demand could bring the cost down to the $0.15 to $0.20 level which would encourage a whole raft of applications such as tracking parcels through systems to being part of airline tickets which need never be taken out of a pocket or bag. Other companies have patents in this area but BTG see the advantage of its system is that competitive systems need a unique ID for each chip whereas its system does not need this to count groups of chips. BTG slid deep into the red last year as a result of a heavy investment program. Chief executive Ian Harvey says that the accelerating growth of new revenues shows they are on track to increase 1996 revenues tenfold by 2006.
