Nokia made the announcement that it had agreed on selling its HERE Mapping business to a group of automobile makers for $3.07 billion. It has been long speculated that Nokia is planning to sell its HERE Map business, but there has been no confirmation forthcoming from the company.
Nokia confirmed that it will hand over HERE Map to a consortium of European car makers including BMW Group, AUDI AG, and Daimler AG (Mercedes). The closing of the deal is expected to take place somewhere within the Q1 of 2016.
The fate of HERE Map has been uncertain ever since the Finnish company sold its Nokia division for devices manufacture to Redmond tech giant, Microsoft. Come April this year, Nokia announced it was considering its options with regards to the fate HERE Maps; one of the options placed on the table was to sell it off.
HERE Map is said to have elicited a lot of interests from prospective buyers from across the world. Other than the car manufacturers, it is rumored there were bids from companies like Uber, Baidu, China’s Navinfo, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook and Apple to buy the platform.
Although the fate of HERE Map is pretty much a done deal, the fate of the staff working under that division is uncertain. The company has yet to announce how many of the staff it will have to let go when the acquisition deal is sealed.
Nokia is currently pursuing a $16.6 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, in a deal expected to be finalized the Q2 of 2016. When that happens, Alcatel-Lucent will be comprised of Nokia Networks, the broadband infrastructure business, and the Nokia Technologies. The company is also said to be positioning itself to launch a new mobile device into the market come 2016.