Furukawa suing Corning on patent
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Furukawa shares are up on Friday on report of its suit, despite a slump in the tech-driven Nikkei
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TOKYO, Japan -- Furukawa Electric Co. confirmed on Friday it has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against U.S.-based Corning Inc.
Furukawa declined to give details, but a report in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun Friday said it was suing a Corning subsidiary in Tokyo District Court seeking 6.2 billion yen ($52 million) in damages.
The Japanese company, the world's second-largest maker of fiber-optic cable behind Corning, claims that Corning Cable Systems International Corp. sold a cable that used technology Furukawa had patented.
Furukawa alleges that the Corning subsidiary made profits of more than 6 billion yen from the cable. Furukawa says Corning infringed its patent on eight-core tape wire, a multilayered optical fiber wire used in communications lines.
Furukawa ran into financial difficulties after spending $2.3 billion to buy the fiber-optic arm of Lucent Technologies in November 2001. Corning bought Lucent's stake in two joint venture companies in China for around $225 million.
But Furukawa lost 101.5 billion yen for the first half of its business year, which ran through September, largely as a result of its U.S. operations.
Furukawa stock is up 1.92 percent at 318 yen on Friday morning, despite a 0.38 percent fall in the benchmark Nikkei average.
