RPX Secondary Offering Seeks Another $60M

RPX Corporation (RPXC) announced pricing of a 3,000,000 share follow-on offering at $20.49 per share.   RPX offers about 1.4 M shares itself with the rest coming from stockholders.  The offering price represents a 15% discount from it’s opening price at $24.10. Trading spiked this morning, landing RPX on Nasdaq’s unusual volume list.

Coincidentally, top officials at Acacia have also recently pocketed about $60M through sales of ACTG stock over the past year.  Joff Wild, in his coverage of the Acacia exec’s payday eerily foreshadowed this move, saying:

There will be other senior executives in other IP-based businesses hoping that such valuations continue for as long as is needed for them to generate their big pay-day. But they may be getting slightly nervous. 

Until early this month, RPX traded fairly consistently between about $25-30 per share, but dipped to slightly under $20 earlier this week.

In related news, IAM also provides good coverage of ICAP’s closely-watched CNS auction, which offers 22 covenants from various patent owners that are already targeting over 400 different companies.  ICAP is likely confident in the auction’s success.  I’ve previously suggested (See: Patent Owners ‘Fleeing’ RPX Acquisition Model) that ICAP’s success poses a substantial competitive hurdle to RPX’s long-term success.