Kvaerner is a Norway-based engineering and construction services company. Major subsidiaries are Aker Kvaerner and Aker Yards.
Kvaerner was founded in Oslo in 1853 and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 1967. By the 1990s, Kvaerner assembled a collection of engineering and industrial businesses, including shipbuilding, construction of offshore oil and gas platforms, production of pulp and paper manufacturing equipment, and operation of shipping fleet.
In 1996, Kvaerner acquired the UK conglomerate Trafalgar House and moved its international headquarters from Oslo to London. It added further acquisitions, financed predominantly by debt, until the economic slowdown in 2001 and a series of management missteps brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy.
In November 2001, Kvaerner was forced to merge with its rival Aker Maritime, a Norwegian oil services group controlled by Kjell Inge Rřkke. Rřkke scuppered the solution preferred by Kvaerner's management, a rescue by Russia's oil giant Yukos. Kvaerner's international headquarters returned to Oslo and Kvaerner was restructured to become a holding company, with operating activities concentrated in Aker Kvaerner and Aker Yards.
We agree with Kvaerner that the district court did not err in granting summary judgment of noninfringement of claim 10 of the ’707 patent under the doctrine of equivalents.
We are not persuaded by Kvaerner’s arguments, relying on Gentry, that it is essential to the invention for the workover port to enter the assembly “between the two plugs” and that claims reciting a location other than “between the two plugs” are therefore invalid for inadequate description.
We are also not persuaded by Kvaerner’s arguments that the claims are invalid for inadequate description because the specification does not indicate that the workover port may be claimed by reference to the position of the tubing hanger and BOP bore.
Kvaerner, whose market capitalisation has plunged to about 1.3 billion crowns, Â desperately needs a longer-term bailout to overcome losses and huge debts that have already forced it to shrink from a peak of more than 80,000 employees in the late 1990s.
She said that Kvaerner had accepted for the first time that a Kvaerner-Aker merger was a possibility.
But she said Kvaerner's board, fearing that it might be forced to sell itself at too low a price, was insisting on an independent assessment of the two groups' values.
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