Nokia has made a cash offer of about 264 million euro ($400 million) to raise its stake in UK-based software company Symbian from the current 48 per cent to 100 per cent. Symbian’s remaining 52 per cent stake is held jointly by Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung. While the first four companies have agreed to sell their respective stakes, Samsung is yet to accept the offer.
According to Symbian, the takeover was a fundamental move in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation that is expected to start operating in the first half of 2009 and aims to bring together Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to collaborate on a new, royalty-free open source software platform for mobile phones.
