Company: RPID
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001380106-25-000058
Chunk: 34

Company: RAPID MICRO BIOSYSTEMS, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 34
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 including by seeking and maintaining patent protection, protecting our trade secrets and other proprietary information, obtaining and maintaining our licenses to use intellectual property owned by third parties, and continually evaluating third-party technologies for further licensing opportunities. We also seek trademark protection where appropriate to protect the names that identify us as the source of our products and services.

18

We own certain patents, patent applications and intellectual property. We have also entered into certain supply and commercial agreements with various vendors and suppliers under which we receive rights to their intellectual property for use in our products.

As of December 31, 2024, we own 10 granted unexpired patents in the United States, 53 issued patents in foreign jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, China, countries in Europe, India, Japan and Mexico, and 17 pending patent applications in the United States. Our issued patents and pending patent applications cover our technologies and products, including machines, manufactures, compositions of matter, and methods of use with respect thereto, related to the Growth Direct platform. Any patents that may issue from pending applications that we own have expiration dates or, in the case of patent applications, projected statutory expiration dates, between 2032 and 2045, excluding, with respect to patents that may be issued from our patent applications, any additional term for patent term adjustments or patent term extensions, if applicable.

Competition

As a life sciences technology company, we face competition from a wide array of companies in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. This competition includes both small companies and large companies with greater financial and technical resources and longer operating histories than our own.

The key competitive factors affecting the success of the products that we develop are likely to be the continued growth of our market position, our ability to expand our integration with existing customers, our ability to develop new products and improve our existing products, and our ability to grow our sales and marketing capabilities. Our commercial opportunity for any of our products could be reduced or eliminated if our competitors develop and commercialize products that are more effective, are more convenient, or are less expensive than our products, or if they are able to more effectively integrate their systems with customers before we do.

We primarily compete with established manufacturers of traditional MQC testing products, such as petri dishes, incubators, and other manual testing equipment, which our products aim to displace. These companies include bioMerieux, Becton Dickinson, Charles River Labs, Merck Millipore and Thermo Fisher. We also compete with a limited number of companies that have or are attempting to enter