Qualcomm buys into HaloIPT
Tech company acquires wireless electric car charging venture's assets and staff.
Wednesday, November 09 2011 || News || BY Catherine Harris, Businessday.co.nz
In what has been described as a "significant" deal for the University of Auckland, Nasdaq-listed Qualcomm Inc has acquired the assets, technology and staff of HaloIPT for an undisclosed price.
The university will retain its intellectual property rights and the research work will remain there.
HaloIPT is officially based in Britain but the company is a spin-out from the University of Auckland, which formed the company a year ago to commercialise the technology.
"We believe Qualcomm is well positioned to make available this technology to third parties for the wireless charging of electric road vehicles, and the relationship will provide opportunities for continued research and development of this technology," said Peter Lee, chief executive of the university's commercialisation arm, Uniservices.
Qualcomm, best known for licensing mobile phone technology, said it had been investing in wireless power for a number of years and that the acquisition would "further strengthen its technology and patent portfolio".
HaloIPT is based on two decades of wireless power research out of the University of Auckland. The technology has been used to light tunnels, in factories, and has powered buses in two Italian cities for a decade, but HaloIPT is focussed purely on its transport applications.
The company claims to be the first to have made "inductive power transfer" technology for charging wireless cars commercially available.
Franceska Banga of the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, which contributed seed funding, said it was a textbook example of taking technology to market.
"This is a very good outcome. Many niche New Zealand technology companies need to partner with major international firms in order to break into major markets," she said.
Another early investor, the Trans Tasman Commericalisation Fund, said the deal was "excellent" and had achieved "significant returns".
HaloIPT's executive chairman John Miles agreed the deal was a "terrific achievement" and said he was "immensely proud of what has been achieved by our team at HaloIPT over the past 18 months".
Agree with the comments that NZ companies need to look to partner offshore. Although this sounds more like an acquisition than a partnership.
Would be good to now what "significant returns" mean. Like the other deals with NZVIF invovled there is no transparancy on the returns. There is no need to disclose the purcahse price etc, a % return or IRR would be meaningful.
Posted by Anonymous at 02:05 on November 9, 2011
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