Nokia getting there with HERE as rivals talk up price Nokia HERE, its mapping and location businesses, might be worth more than the former handset giant thought, as rival companies talk up the value, and a consortium of car companies square up to an alliance of Uber and China’s Baidu. Nokia bought Navteq for $8.1bn and renamed it HERE, and then fell on hard times and sold its …
Was thinking along the same line, but a 2 billion dollars lose it better than the 6 billion dollars it looked like they could have lost if they had sold it the first time.
I also wonder what else the company got when they purchased Navteq for $8.1bn but is not part of the potential sale (some interesting patents?)
You're reading it wrong. The original cost was 8.1 billion USD. The 6 billion estimate is in Euro. Ignoring what the Euro/Dollar exchange rate was at purchase, 8.1bn USD is about 7bn Euro. So they'd lose 1 billion on purchase price.
That's OK if they've made that profit in the preceding years and especially so if the bidding war pushes past the 6.
"You are a corp, you wanna make $$$$ by fsck'ing the competition"
And you want to make a shed load of cash from the sale of over-priced options. I've not checked Audi's price list, but as a general rule built in satnav is about five to eight times the cost of a standalone Garmin unit, and map upgrades are charged at obscene prices through the dealer network.
Car makers profits are intrinsically tied up with options added to the base vehicle, and built in sat nav has been one of the higher margin options for many years. Even if Audi funded OSM, that would not result in any lower cost for the built in navigation or for the upgrades.
Clearly you don't know what it takes to actually make the underlying map.
There's a lot of work that goes in to properly identifying the location of the road link, type of road, address range, positions of speed limit signs, over passes, which lane you should be in when you are using it for driving instructions... and more.
There are reasons why the auto consortium want to buy HERE that go beyond simple map making.
Posted ANON for the obvious reasons. ;-)
If we're talking about the Android and iOS apps then people would be willing to pay for traffic, multi-country maps, and hi-fi voices. But really end users don't bring in a lot of profit, it's the companies who licence the maps. It's not as if Google Maps is free for licencees either.
For me it was always the killer app for the Nokia Windows Phones and I suspect it is why they ended up with (almost) the entire (albeit small) market. It's also now available as an Android app and I used it last weekend with downloaded maps on my Nexus 7. IMO it's better than any other turn by turn, free or paid.
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