Nokia has agreed to pay $8.1bn (£4.0bn) for the US-based digital map supplier Navteq, but there are some concerns that it may be offering too much.
Well, it seems Nokia has paid a bit too much, considering that Tom Tom offered for the rival company Tele Atlas only $2.6bn.
However this is a great and important step for Nokia, the world’s biggest cellphone maker, that it is renewing itself to become, as the CEO OPK stated, an Internet company.
Still long way to go, but let´s not forget that Nokia has gone through big transformations during its life-time. A bit of history here:
Nokia, the telecommunication Finnish company, takes its name from the town were it was founded in 1865. At that time, Nokia was a conglomerate of three very different businesses and had its roots in paper, rubber, and cables. In the 1970s and 1980s Nokia expanded its activity into the area of consumer electronics (especially television), while a small part of the group began the development of mobile phones and digital communication exchange. The mobile era begins in 1981 when the first international mobile phone network was built. This network was based on the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) standard and it was initially limited to Nordic countries. In 1987 the GSM standard was adopted. GSM stands for Global System for Mobile communications and it was a standard aimed at a widespread adoption worldwide. On July 1, 1991, Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri made the worlds first GSM call, using Nokia equipment. Nokia launched its first digital hand held GSM phone, the Nokia 1011, in 1992.