Say you're the CEO of Motorola -- a company that's fallen on hard times as of late, aiming for a rebound -- and you're looking to take a little dig at the world's largest cellphone manufacturer. Where do you begin? In this case,
Nokia's purchase of NAVTEQ has fallen into your lap like a gift from the gods, giving you a chance to pan the "stunning" $8.1 billion sale price and casually drop the knowledge that Motorola had previously considered and passed on a bid. There's no telling where the fact ends and the fiction begins here, but at a recent talk to students of the University of Chicago's business school, Zander said that Motorola looked at scooping up NAVTEQ and concluded that it really didn't want to get into the applications biz for fear that it'd upset carriers -- a fear Nokia is challenging head on with both the acquisition and its
Ovi initiative. Oh no you didn't, Ed! That's like Nokia dissing the iPhone's lack of 3G...
oh, wait.
It may have won approval from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and NAVTEQ shareholders alike, but it looks like the EU's European Commission needs a bit more time to think over Nokia's acquisition of the company, and it's now launched an "in-depth" probe into the matter. According to Reuters, the Commission said that the "proposed merger raises serious doubts with regards to ... competition concerns," although it was quick to add that the decision to open the inquiry does not prejudge the result of the probe. Among other things, the probe will apparently attempt to asses whether the purchase would affect the cost of maps for other companies providing navigation services on cellphones. If all of this has a familiar ring, it should, because it wasn't all that long ago that the EU launched a similar probe into TomTom's similar acquisition of map-maker Tele Atlas.
