A materials business changing hands
Selling a materials company? License the test data apart
Updated
A materials supplier or test lab that is sold or closed takes years of test results with it. Licensed on their own, the measurements can earn separately from the sale, if the company can show they are its own.
Separate measured data from licensed data
Where a database's terms say its content is its own, the values copied from it are not the seller's: Total Materia's terms say its content is proprietary to Total Materia AG. What a buyer pays for is what the company measured itself.
Source: Materials database software data terms
Data in an informatics platform depends on that platform's terms, and of the 11 we read, 11 say nothing about AI training on what customers upload, so ask before an export.
Source: Materials database software data terms
Check what REACH already shares
Studies already shared with co-registrants under REACH come with cost-sharing records, which help show what a study cost.
Source: Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/9
Three routes
A trading company can license its data and carry on. A company that is closing can have its directors sell the data only until someone is appointed to wind it up, and a sale they make after a winding-up petition is void if the court then orders the company wound up, unless the court allows it. A liquidator then takes the sale over, in a solvent members' liquidation as much as an insolvent one; an administrator's consent is needed for any sale while the company is in administration; and once the company is dissolved whatever it still owned passes to the Crown. An adviser handling the deal can introduce it for a share of our fee. Tell us which on the materials data enquiry form.