German Car Manufacturers Buy Nokia HERE Mapping Service For $2.74 billion
After long talks and negotiation, a collaboration of Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen’s Audi have agreed to buy Nokia’s HERE mapping service for $2.74 billion.
All the three partners - Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen’s premium division Audi will hold equal stakes in the HERE maps and no one will own a majority interest, they said making a joint statement. The deal is expected to be finalized and closed by March 2016. Nokia said that the transaction has an enterprise value of €2.8 billion, including assumption of nearly €300 million in HERE liabilities. The buyers also said, “For the automotive industry this is the basis for new assistance systems and ultimately fully autonomous driving,”
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Nokia invested $8.1 billion in 2008 to acquire US-based Navteq, a company that provided geographic information systems to be used in the automotive industry. HERE maps have a vast database of 200 countries and supports 50 languages. Self-driving cars use such intelligent mapping systems as a base to perform independent functions like recalculating a route if data of an accident or a traffic jam is sent to the car.
These mapping systems are the very basis on which the future cars will perform collision detection and other features of self-driving cars.