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Nokia to Buy Intellisync for $430 Million
Wednesday November 16, 11:17 am ET
Nokia to Buy Wireless E-Mail Provider Intellisync for $430 Million
HELSINKI, Finland (AP) -- Nokia Corp. said Wednesday it is paying $430 million to acquire Intellisync Corp., a provider of wireless e-mail service for cellular carriers, adding to the mobile phone maker's growing arsenal of products to compete with BlackBerry.
The deal comes just two months after Nokia barged into the increasingly crowded field of BlackBerry rivals by becoming the first major handset maker to announce its own brand of mobile e-mail service -- essentially becoming a rival to the U.S. company it is now acquiring.
Nokia is offering $5.25 per share in cash for each share of Intellisync, which provides mobile access to e-mail and other desktop information to about 500,000 users through wireless carriers under their own brand names.
The buyout price is below what Intellisync's shares were fetching before the deal announced, and so the stock sagged 41 cents to $5.13 in Wednesday morning's Nasdaq trading, down 7.4 percent. Nokia's U.S. shares slipped 11 cents to $16.92 on the New York Stock Exchange.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2006.
Nokia announced in September that it was entering the mobile e-mail market with its own application, Nokia Business Center, but said the new service would join rather than replace the existing lineup of mobile e-mail and productivity options available on Nokia devices. Those include BlackBerry from Research in Motion Ltd., GoodLink from Good Technology Inc., and applications from Seven Networks Inc. and Visto Corp.
Intellisync's services are generally rebranded by carriers. For example, the product is sold as Wireless Sync by Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC.
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