TORONTO — Protecting Sonos’s intellectual property from Google was an existential challenge for the smart-speaker company, CEO Patrick Spence said at The Logic Summit in Toronto, framing the recent legal victory over the web giant as a matter of ensuring investors keep funding ideas and development.

“I felt a strong duty to stand up and say, ‘No, this is the wrong thing.’ You can’t steal somebody else’s technology, and just really copy it and put it out there,” said Spence, who joined the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based wireless-speaker company in 2012, after 14 years in various roles at BlackBerry. “I’m really worried there’s just not going to be as much oxygen in the room … where they’re not going to invest because they’re worried about what Big Tech is doing.”

In May, Sonos won a US$32.5-million jury verdict against Google in U.S. federal court for infringement of one of Sonos’s smart-speaker patents. “I was very confident that the multimillion-dollar investment that we’re making in legal fees will come with a good return for our company,” said Spence. 

It wasn’t the company’s first win over Google, whom Sonos accused three years ago of copying patented technology after a partnership in 2013. As The Logic reported in January 2022, the U.S. International Trade Commission found that Google had been illegally using five Sonos patents, and banned the tech giant from importing a range of devices into the U.S. from its overseas manufacturing sites.

Since the Trump administration slapped tariffs on Chinese products, Sonos has expanded its Asian manufacturing into Vietnam and Malaysia, said Spence. But manufacturing is beginning to move back to North America as robotics become more prevalent, reducing the impact of labour costs in the West, he added.  

Still, Spence remains concerned with the audio industry’s reduced revenue of up to 30 per cent year over year, describing the negative turn as a “macroeconomic challenge” and a “wake-up call” to every company affected in the sector. 

Earlier this month, Sonos revealed in a U.S. regulatory filing that it would lay off about seven per cent of its workforce, or about 130 people, as part of a restructuring plan that it expects to cost as much as US$14 million. “We take it very seriously,” said Spence. “You’re impacting people’s lives and family; it absolutely sucks to be doing it. But you also know that it needs to be done in order to make sure that the company is on the right path for the future.”