Dallas, Texas 06/22/2015 (Financialstrend) – Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) is chipping away its assets one by one, this time it is the map business known as ‘Here’. ‘Here’ is the navigational data processing service of the company and soon it will be acquired by one of the numerous companies interested in it. The bidding closed on June 18. Several prominent companies like Baidu Inc (NASDAQ:BIDU), Uber, a group of European car manufacturers and several equity firms have bid for this asset.
Here And Its Valuable Assets
Earlier figures determined the market value of Here at around $2 billion. But at the current situation, it will be sold at a lot higher price than that. The reason is simple. ‘Here’ holds very important patents and location data that are considered as the prominent assets. Such type of assets are rarely sold. And there are several companies who do not want to lose this opportunity. It is said that a normal or basic navigational service typically uses 20-25 attributes while gathering location data whereas ‘Here’ uses more than 250+ attributes. This huge difference is made possible by the unmatched Hardware and software possessed by Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK). This data can be very useful for car manufacturers and smartphone navigation services.
Prominent Bidders
Car manufacturers like Audi, BMW and Daimler are considered to be the likely winners. Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) has extensively dealt with car manufacturers before. Almost 80% of the car industry in Europe uses maps service by the company. Uber and Baidu Inc (NASDAQ:BIDU) have also shown interest in buying. Another mapping company Navinfo has placed the bid.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA), Samsung, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) are some of the companies who are clearly interested in acquiring ‘Here’ but it is not confirmed whether these companies have placed a bid or not.
The final round of bidding will be over by this week and the mapping division of Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) will welcome its new owner. The coming days will bring more details of the acquisition.
