Nokia says eyes more Internet buys

Tue Sep 9, 2008 9:02am BST
 
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By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia's Internet offering is far from ready and the world's top cellphone maker is seeking further acquisitions to speed up the roll out of new services, Niklas Savander, the head of the unit, said in an interview.

Nokia bought U.S. digital maps firm Navteq for $8.1 billion in July and has acquired ten smaller firms to jump-start its Internet services business as the growth in the cellphones market is set to stall.

"We're not done," Savander told Reuters when asked about further acquisition plans.

Likely targets could be small companies which develop services Nokia itself plans to offer in the future -- enabling the Finnish firm to roll those services out faster, he said.

In a media event later on Tuesday, Nokia will introduce The Files on Ovi service, based on the acquisition of Avvenu last year, which allows users to store files on the Web so that they are always accessible, an increasingly common service offered by Internet firms like Google and Yahoo.

Nokia introduced a new personal information management (PIM) synchronization service for calendar, contacts, notes and tasks between Nokia phones and its Internet services site -- similar to Apple and Microsoft offerings.

"We obviously think there is genuine consumer demand. Information that is contained on device is becoming more and more critical to people," Savander said in a recent interview scheduled for publishing on Tuesday.

"We are incrementally, step-by-step, building up the offering that has to be matched with demand," he said.  Continued...

 

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