|
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 |
|
Finnish giant buys out Symbian stakeholders, makes Smartphone OS open source. Nothing to do with Linux, mind…
Reportedly denying suggestions that it’s anything to do with Linux (or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, or the iPhone, or Google’s Android) Nokia has purchased the 52% of Symbian Limited it did not already own and aims to make the Symbian OS available on an open source basis.
Nokia is paying €264mn to acquire the shareholdings of Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens. The remaining shareholder Samsung is expected to agree to the deal. Symbian’s software is used in two-thirds of Smartphones and about 6% of all mobile phones. Nokia says it expects its new purchase to break even in 2010 and boost earnings in 2011.
Symbian says the move is a fundamental step in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation which will attempt to bring together a number of different operating systems-Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP, in order to create a single open mobile software platform. The foundation, which plans to begin operating early in 2009, will bring together Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T. LG, Samsung,
STMicroelectronics
,
Texas
Instruments and Vodafone to collaborate on a new, open, royalty-free mobile phone software platform.
Commenting on Nokia’s acquisition, analysts Ovum said that fragmentation within the software platform market is the biggest single barrier to mobile data services and revenues. There are currently many initiatives to try and solve this. The two most promising candidates to make a real difference are, in Ovum’s view, the LiMo Foundation and, now, the Symbian Foundation. Together with Microsoft’s growing presence in the market there is a real opportunity for the industry to start to coalesce their activities around these platforms. In the longer term there is the larger opportunity for the Symbian and Linux communities to become closer and indeed join together; this would make a significant impact on service providers’ ability to derive revenue from mobile services. The creation of the Symbian Foundation reflects the fact that Symbian’s competitive landscape has started to change rapidly over the past year with new entrants and old competitors increasing their influence. Linux has become a real threat to Symbian’s business with a number of Linux initiatives gaining serious momentum (e.g. LiMO and Google’s Open Handset Alliance). The success of LiMo is of particular importance here because the model that Nokia and others have adopted for the Symbian Foundation is essentially the same as that of LiMo. This is an endorsement of LiMo’s approach and demonstrates that Nokia believes that this is part of its success.
Despite a promising start and later becoming the leading third party operating system (achieving shipments in 206mn mobile phones as of March this year). Symbian has not established itself as an industry standard. This was due to a number of factors but a crucial part of this was Nokia’s ownership of Symbian and OEMs being reluctant to license key software components from their biggest competitor. Symbian’s commercial success has been driven by Nokia and its adoption of the Symbian OS as part of the S60 platform, which it has deployed widely within its device portfolio.
Ian Channing |
