Nokia buys Navteq for $8.1 billion

Nokia today acquired Navteq for $8.1 billion, its biggest ever acquisition and rather much expensive as termed by industry analysts.

I had never heard much about Navteq earlier but it turns out to be the biggest player in Navigation services. With this acquisition Nokia has transformed itself from being a handset maker to being a global powerhouse for navigation and location based services.
Navteq supplies some of data and information for Google Maps,Yahoo Maps, MSN Maps, and MapQuest. This has put Nokia right in control of maps on mobile devices as well as the web and desktop as far as maps and other LBS are concerned.

Nokia press release.

"Location based services are one of the cornerstones of Nokia's Internet services strategy. The acquisition of NAVTEQ is another step toward Nokia becoming a leading player in this space," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President and CEO, Nokia. "By joining forces with NAVTEQ, we will be able to bring context and geographical information to a number of our Internet services with accelerated time to market. We also look forward to maintaining and enhancing the services and support provided to NAVTEQ's existing and future customers".

"Nokia's unique vision for location based services aligns perfectly with NAVTEQ's vision to enable everyone to find their way to people, places and opportunities on mobile communications devices, cars, desktop computers and in all the other places that are important to them," said NAVTEQ President and CEO Judson Green. "It's really exciting to imagine what we can achieve by combining our location experience with the resources of a company that has a customer base of more than 900 million people."

Maps on mobile devices have a great potential and something the users on the move always wanted. Last week Google announced that iphone has driven the usage of google maps to new heights.

Hopefully things will get a lot more exiting with future gps enabled devices like the N95.