Nokia just announced that they will purchase Montreal’s OZ Communications, Wellington Financial Fund III portfolio company. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
We are thrilled for the OZ team, of course. This is a terrific outcome after ten years of hard work.
OZ will help Nokia build on its success with consumers. Let’s face it, the enterprise market has not been kind to Nokia. Intellisync, for example, didn’t work out so well. But Nokia dominates in the consumer market, especially in Europe and Asia.
What OZ does is enables branded (think Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MySpace, etc.) email, instant messaging and social networking on handsets. Their focus has been consumers and they had typically worked with feature phones. They have recently moved up-market with an enterprise-like “Smart Mail” offering aimed at professionals, small business owners and frequent email users.
What Nokia does with OZ will be interesting to watch. Right now, OZ helps carriers increase their ARPU. If Nokia integrates OZ into their Ovi suite then they can capture some of that revenue. At some point handset growth has to slow down and that monthly revenue will be awfully nice to have.
CWN
here is a link to coverage in the Montreal Gazette
Congratulations to OZ and Wellington!