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LONDON, Nov 9 (Reuters) - British online supermarket and
technology group Ocado was hit on Monday with a second
legal claim over patents by Norwegian robotics company
AutoStore.
While in last month's lawsuit AutoStore alleged Ocado
infringed patents, its latest action seeks to confirm that it is
the inventor and rightful owner of certain patents that have
been filed by Ocado.
AutoStore said the action was filed at the UK's Intellectual
Property Office, which it said was standard procedure before
transfer to the High Court of England & Wales.
Ocado dismissed the claim and said it would fight it.
The company has only a 1.8% share of Britain's grocery
market. However, its state-of-the-art technology for robotically
operated warehouses has spawned partnership deals with
supermarket chains around the world, underpinning a stock market
valuation of over 19 billion pounds ($25 billion).
AutoStore said its new claim concerned patents filed by
Ocado since June 2014 relating to the methods, systems and
apparatus for controlling the movement of robots in systems such
as the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP).
AutoStore said Ocado filed patents covering technologies
that were invented by AutoStore and claimed numerous Ocado
executives as "inventors," including Chief Executive Tim
Steiner.
"Ocado took advantage of being our customer and having
access to AutoStore’s market-leading technology and then
attempted to assert ownership over what it had learned from
AutoStore by filing its own patents," said AutoStore CEO, Karl
Johan Lier.
Ocado said AutoStore's claim had no merit.
"Any suggestion that we have taken their IP (intellectual
property) is absurd," Ocado said in a statement.
"These inventions are ours and we will continue to defend
our intellectual property by whatever means necessary."
Shares in Ocado, up 74% so far this year, were down 14% at
1505 GMT, also hit by Pfizer saying its experimental
COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective. A successful
vaccine could curtail a recent boom in online grocery shopping.
($1 = 0.7595 pounds)
(Reporting by James Davey; Editing by Mark Potter)
