A land­mark rul­ing by a US court has seen elec­tron­ics giant Apple hailed as vic­tors in its ‘patent war’ with Sam­sung.  The net result of the judg­ment means more than $12 bil­lion has been wiped from the val­ue of the latter’s shares, as world mar­kets react to the news.

A patent victory 

In one of the most close­ly observed patent cas­es in recent years, the jury at the fed­er­al court in San Jose returned a ver­dict that Sam­sung were guilty of infring­ing on six Apple patents and ordered them to pay $1.05bn in dam­ages.  Friday’s rul­ing has had a heavy impact on shares in Sam­sung, with prices crash­ing to 1.173m won ($1,000), before climb­ing frac­tion­al­ly to 1.180m won at the close. 

Designs on the future 

Some pre­dic­tions sug­gest the deci­sion will bol­ster Apple’s mar­ket share and lead to the US giant’s dom­i­nance of the bur­geon­ing mobile com­put­ing field across the board.  How­ev­er, ana­lysts are also spec­u­lat­ing that Sam­sung and oth­er mobile phone design­ers, mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies and con­sumers using the Android plat­form – Google’s answer to the iPhone’s native soft­ware — could ben­e­fit from an increased will­ing­ness to car­ry on pro­mot­ing inno­va­tion with­out resort­ing to bla­tant copies of exist­ing tech­nolo­gies.  Speak­ing about the case, Tim Bajarin, pres­i­dent of Cre­ative Strate­gies Inc argued that “Sam­sung is already on path to not copy Apple in the future and will try to cre­ate a dif­fer­ent lev­el of dis­tinc­tive­ness in future prod­ucts” – all of which will suit mobile adver­tis­ing strate­gists look­ing for dis­tinc­tive ways to posi­tion Samsung’s mobile phone adver­tis­ing in the after­math of the court’s decision.

The last word 

That being the case, there appears to be an accep­tance that some short-term pain is inevitable.  Tech­nol­o­gy ana­lysts pre­dict that Sam­sung will suf­fer a decline in earn­ings equiv­a­lent to 4 per cent; and there could be fur­ther impli­ca­tions, as Apple intend to pur­sue an injunc­tion that would pre­vent the sale of all mobiles deemed to infringe their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, leav­ing their South Kore­an rivals forced to with­draw hand­sets from the mar­ket.  The two com­pa­nies are due to lock horns again on 20 Sep­tem­ber, with Sam­sung promis­ing that Apple has not had the “final word” in this case.