Nokia to Acquire Symbian Ltd.

What Happened?

On June 24th, Nokia Corporation (NYSE: NOK) announced its intent to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited, a company of which they currently own a 47.9% stake, for an estimated $410 million.

In conjunction with the planned acquisition, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and NTT DOCOMO, among others, will be launching the Symbian Foundation, an open and non-profit organization that will develop a royalty-free, Symbian OS-based software development platform. Pending the acquisition’s regulatory approval, the Symbian Foundation’s launch is expected in the first half of 2009 with a complete, integrated open source platform anticipated to be available in the first half of 2010.

VDC’s View

Nokia’s planned acquisition of Symbian stands to further amplify the pressure on commercial mobile software vendors to compete on price and provide an ecosystem of value-added technology above and beyond the traditional domains of mobile operating systems and tools.

Stay tuned as VDC looks to comment further on this news.