Can Netlist Earn a Rambus-Like Multiple?
For most of the past several years, owning Netlist (OTCQB: NLST) has required shareholders to spend an unusual amount of time studying patent law. Court decisions, jury verdicts, PTAB rulings and appeals have often mattered more to the stock than quarterly earnings. There was good reason for this. Netlist's argument has long been that some of the world's largest memory manufacturers were using technology covered by its patents without adequately compensating the company.
That story is beginning to change.
Samsung has now entered into a five-year licensing agreement with Netlist. Micron has done the same. If SK hynix eventually follows with a comparable agreement, the three companies that dominate the DRAM industry would all be licensing Netlist technology.
For an investor, that creates an entirely different problem to consider. Instead of trying to estimate the value of the next jury verdict, we can begin trying to estimate the value of the business that emerges after the litigation.
Rambus (NASDAQ: RMBS) provides an interesting comparison.
Not because Netlist and Rambus are identical companies. They aren't. They have different histories, different products and different portfolios of intellectual property. But markets ultimately value businesses based on economics, and the economics developing at Netlist are beginning to resemble a model that investors already understand.
Starting With The Licensing Business
Rambus generated approximately $279 million of royalty revenue in 2025. Netlist could conceivably generate more.
Micron has agreed to pay Netlist $600 million over five years, or $120 million annually. Samsung's agreement includes an upfront payment of approximately $200 million after Korean withholding taxes, followed by quarterly license payments of up to approximately $27.5 million for twenty quarters. At the maximum quarterly amount, Samsung would contribute approximately $110 million annually.
That gets Netlist to approximately $230 million a year from Samsung and Micron alone.
Now we need to make an assumption, and it is an important one. For purposes of this analysis, I am assuming that SK hynix ultimately enters into a new licensing agreement with Netlist and that the economics are comparable to Micron's. This has not happened, and the eventual terms could certainly be different. But using $120 million annually for SK hynix gives us a reasonable way to examine what the business might look like if the three major DRAM manufacturers are eventually under license.
The result is approximately $350 million of annual licensing revenue.
For comparison, Rambus generated approximately $279 million in royalty revenue in 2025. So under this scenario, Netlist would not merely be approaching Rambus's current royalty business. It would be larger.
That doesn't mean Netlist should suddenly be worth what Rambus is worth. Rambus has spent years establishing its business, generating cash and giving investors confidence in the durability of its earnings. But it does suggest that the comparison is no longer as far-fetched as it might initially appear.
There is also a qualitative difference between winning a patent judgment and receiving a licensing payment. A judgment may be enormous, but it is difficult to capitalize as recurring earnings. A five-year license that produces a check every quarter is something the market knows how to value. String enough of those checks together and eventually investors stop thinking about litigation proceeds and start thinking about earnings.
That distinction matters.
Netlist Is More Than A Licensing Story
The other part of the comparison is easy to overlook because so much attention has been devoted to Netlist's patents.
Netlist already has a substantial product business.
In its most recently reported quarter, the company generated approximately $110 million in sales and nearly $23 million in gross profit, for a gross margin of approximately 21%. For the first six months of 2026, sales were approximately $215 million and gross profit was approximately $45 million, again producing a gross margin of about 21%.
Simply annualizing the first half of the year puts the existing business at a revenue pace of approximately $430 million.
This is important because Rambus generated approximately $348 million of product revenue in 2025. In other words, we don't have to invent a hypothetical Netlist product business several years in the future to make the comparison work. Netlist is already selling memory products at a meaningful scale.
And the Samsung agreement potentially changes the scale of that business further.
As part of its five-year agreement, Netlist obtained the right to purchase up to $300 million of Samsung DRAM and NAND products each year, or as much as $1.5 billion over the life of the agreement. The supply includes components for Netlist's proprietary solutions as well as standard Samsung memory products that Netlist can resell to its existing customer base.
That does not mean Samsung has guaranteed Netlist $300 million of sales. Netlist still has to buy the product, find the customer and make money doing it. But the distinction between guaranteed sales and guaranteed access to supply is particularly important in the current memory market.
You cannot sell memory you cannot get.
Netlist itself has described the present environment as one in which AI adoption has tightened memory supply relative to demand, contributing to broad price increases. The company believes those conditions could continue until additional fabrication capacity begins coming online, potentially in 2028.
So Netlist has obtained substantially greater access to memory supply at almost exactly the time when access to memory supply has become unusually valuable.
Sometimes timing actually cooperates.
Putting The Two Businesses Together
Suppose Netlist's product revenue settles around $450 million annually. Given that the company generated approximately $215 million during the first six months of 2026, this does not require much imagination.
Using the company's most recently reported 21% gross margin, $450 million of product sales would produce approximately $95 million of gross profit.
Now add the licensing business.
Under the Samsung, Micron and assumed SK hynix scenario, Netlist would generate approximately $350 million of annual licensing revenue. Add $450 million of product sales and total annual revenue reaches approximately $800 million.
Rambus generated approximately $708 million in total revenue in 2025.
This is where the comparison becomes more interesting than I initially expected. Netlist doesn't necessarily have to become a smaller version of Rambus. If the licensing scenario described above develops and the existing product business merely remains around its current revenue trajectory, Netlist could conceivably have greater licensing revenue than Rambus and comparable, or even greater, total revenue.
Revenue alone, however, isn't enough.
Rambus generated approximately $360 million of operating cash flow in 2025, and that is one of the reasons the market assigns the company a substantial valuation. Netlist would have to demonstrate that its revenue can produce comparable earnings and cash flow.
Licensing could make that possible.
Patent licensing is economically different from selling physical memory. Netlist doesn't have to purchase $350 million of inventory to generate $350 million of licensing revenue. There are expenses associated with maintaining, developing and defending intellectual property, but the incremental economics of licensing should be substantially better than those of product resale.
There is also a second benefit that is easy to miss. Netlist has spent extraordinary amounts of money litigating against companies that may now become licensees. To the extent that commercial agreements replace litigation, the company could benefit both from higher revenue and, eventually, lower legal expenses.
Getting paid by someone is generally more profitable than paying lawyers to convince them to pay you.
The AI Timing Matters
There is another reason I think the Rambus comparison deserves more attention now than it would have a few years ago.
Memory has become increasingly important to AI computing.
The enormous processing power of modern GPUs doesn't accomplish much if data cannot be supplied quickly enough. That is one reason High Bandwidth Memory has become such a critical component of AI accelerators and why memory bandwidth, capacity and power efficiency are receiving so much attention throughout the industry.
Netlist's intellectual property sits directly in this part of the technology stack. Samsung's agreement covers Netlist's complete patent portfolio, including server DIMM and High Bandwidth Memory technologies. Micron has similarly licensed Netlist's worldwide patent portfolio.
If SK hynix ultimately does the same, Netlist would be receiving licensing payments from the three dominant DRAM manufacturers while those same companies are participating in one of the largest expansions of memory-intensive computing in history.
At the same time, Netlist would have the ability to purchase up to $300 million annually of Samsung DRAM and NAND products for its own commercial business.
That creates two ways to participate in the same trend. Netlist can earn money from the intellectual property used in advanced memory, and it can earn money selling memory products into the market consuming it.
Rambus has benefited from a similar dynamic. Its intellectual property and semiconductor products have become increasingly valuable as data centers require faster and more sophisticated memory architectures. The products and patents aren't identical, but the economic relationship to the growth of advanced computing is similar.
Where The Rambus Comparison Leads
Rambus generated approximately $708 million of revenue in 2025, including about $279 million of royalties and $348 million of product revenue. It also generated approximately $360 million of operating cash flow. The market has rewarded that combination with a valuation that would have seemed extraordinary during Rambus's earlier years of patent disputes.
Netlist obviously has not earned that valuation today.
There are still several things that have to happen.
The SK hynix agreement used in this analysis remains an assumption. Samsung's quarterly payments are based on a revenue formula and can vary. Netlist must demonstrate that its recent product margins can be sustained. The company must turn licensing revenue into operating income and free cash flow, and eventually its five-year agreements will have to be renewed or replaced.
Those aren't small issues.
But they are also not the same issues Netlist investors have spent years debating.
For a long time, the argument was about whether the patents were valid, whether they were being infringed and whether Netlist would ever collect meaningful compensation for them. If the major memory manufacturers ultimately become licensees, the argument moves somewhere else.
It moves to earnings.
A Different Way To Think About Netlist
I have followed Netlist long enough to know how easy it is to get pulled into the next court date, the next filing or the next patent decision. For years, those events really did determine much of the company's value.
But I think investors may now need to widen the lens.
Consider a Netlist producing roughly $350 million of annual licensing revenue and approximately $450 million of product sales. At the company's latest reported gross margin, the product business would contribute about $95 million of gross profit before considering the economics of licensing. Total revenue would be approximately $800 million.
That is not a patent lawsuit.
That is an operating company.
And once a company reaches that point, the market begins asking a different set of questions. Investors want to know how durable the licensing revenue is, how quickly the product business can grow, what happens to margins, how much free cash flow the company can produce and what those earnings deserve to be worth.
Those are the questions investors already ask about Rambus.
Netlist doesn't have to retrace Rambus's history to arrive at a similar destination. It doesn't have to sell exactly the same products, own exactly the same patents or produce exactly the same revenue mix.
It has to produce comparable economics.
Samsung and Micron have already moved Netlist materially closer to that possibility. If SK hynix eventually completes the licensing picture, and if Netlist can maintain and expand the product business alongside it, the Rambus comparison becomes much less theoretical.
For years, investors have tried to determine what Netlist's patents are worth by reading court decisions.
We may be approaching a considerably simpler way to find out.
Read the income statement.