Georg Papst Died

Dipl.-Ing. Georg Friedrich Papst, the founder president and co-owner of Papst Licensing GmbH & Co. KG, died on Saturday, March 10, 2012.

He established the company in 1993, which has for many years fought to enforce its numerous patents against patent infringers.

Today, the company continues its commitment of recognizing and protecting intellectual property.

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Based in St. Goergen, Germany, the firm concluded more than 150 license agreements with IT and CE companies (Seagate, Nidec, LG, Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba, LiteOn, WD, HP, BenQ, Minebea, Matsushita, etc.) especially for HDD's and optical disc drive's motors.

About all HDD makers pay royalties to Papst Licensing for motor technology, some even several times over.

That's true for instance of Seagate, which pays three times: first for its own drives, then two more as a result of its acquisitions of two competitors: Conner Peripherals and more recently Maxtor, each with its own Papst licenses, which are not invalidated by acquisitions.

The price paid for Maxtor, including the pre-existing royalties for Quantum, acquired in 2000, was not disclosed, but according to Jerold Schnayer of Welsh & Katz, the law firm that represents Papst in these matters, the decade-long licensing effort has generated in excess of $100 million in royalty payments for around 130 license agreements.

We do know that WD paid $24 million and motor-maker Minebea $6.7 million.

Over the last years, Georg Papst gradually withdrew his involvement in the operative business of Papst Licensing, and his two sons, Constantin and Daniel, who joined the company respectively in 2002 and 2005, took over more and more responsibility in running the company in their capacities as directors and owners.

"Our father quite early on placed our company on a solid and broad base so that the company would not be dependent on him to be successful. While we will miss him, the company continues to have the necessary expertise and experience, and our father’s death will in no way affect the company’s day-to-day business, nor its on-going negotiations and litigations," say the sons.

Georg Papst, 76, graduated from his electrotechnical studies in Karlsruhe in 1958, earning a Dipl.-Ing. (FH), and formed the technology within Papst Motoren GmbH & Co. KG until its involuntary sale in 1992 while he was one of the managing directors and owners. Directly thereafter he founded Papst Licensing to monetize the patent portfolio of Papst Motoren AG established by is father Hermann in 1942. In 1989 Georg Papst founded and headed Papst Minebea Disc Motor GmbH, which developed and manufactured HDD spindle motors. The same year, he founded and ran Papst Engineering GmbH, offering solutions in the field of automation engineering.