Alibaba taking shine to patents ahead of IPO in the US

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Facebook went through a similar fight with Yahoo and ended up buying 750 patents from IBM to settle their dispute in July 2012, two months after it began selling shares to the public.

Google paid Yahoo to resolve a patent dispute months before its 2004 public offering and in 2011 bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM as part of a strategy to defend its Android operating system from infringement claims.

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IBM, the world's largest computer-services provider, declined to provide details of its patent sale to Alibaba. But Ken King, general manager of intellectual property for the New York-based multinational corporation, said in January that it has received more US patents than any other company for 21 straight years, regularly strikes sales and licensing deals.

Beyond the litigation risk, obtaining patents is a way to protect existing businesses from competition and find new niches that it can profit from, said Don Fancher, a principal of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services in Atlanta.

New revenue

"They're trying to look ahead and see where their strategic direction is in terms of building the business, and creating new revenue streams and do they have the patented technology to help them take that step," Fancher said. "It's a crowded field, but it's also a hugely opportunistic field. Everything's moving to e-commerce."

Inventors based in the Chinese mainland received 6,597 US patents in 2013, the sixth-highest of any non-US country, according to patent office figures. In 2003, 424 patents were issued to inventors based in China.

In the Asian market, Alibaba has more than 1,900 issued and pending applications, Shah of Envision said. In the US, the company filed 50 applications in 2011, 85 in 2012 and 104 last year.

"In their home market, they've been very active," he said. "After their IPO, their patent filings will naturally increase here as well."

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