Nokia today announced it has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited at a price of EUR 3.647 per share. Nokia already owns 48% share in Symbian and will purchase the remaining 52% of Symbian shares for EUR 264 million ($410 million). According to Nokia the acquisition is a fundamental step in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, announced by Nokia, together with AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
“This is a significant milestone in our software strategy,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia. “Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and compelling, web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of consumers.”
Nokia also said that the Symbian Foundation will unify the Symbian mobile platform and will provide royalty-free open platform. The foundation is expected to start operating during first half of 2009 and the membership of the foundation will be open to all organizations for a low annual fee of US $1,500. The foundation will move the platform to open source during next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free. So why suddenly Nokia decided to buy Symbian and make it open source, well there are three companies responsible of this - RIM, Apple and Google. Though Symbian has 60% smartphone market share, the interest in the platform hasn’t matched the interest shown by developers for the iPhone or Android platform. RIM has almost doubled it market share in about 18 months, Apple has reached 7 percent in less than 12 months even though it is selling iPhone in just 6 countries and Google’s Android has been the talk of the town since it was announced last year. So the only option left for Nokia to get the developers excited for the Symbian OS was to make it open source, which might accelerate development for the Symbian platform.
[Via Nokia & Symbian Foundation]