Share This Story  |   Comments (0)

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday approved Finnish cell-phone maker Nokia Oyj's $8.1 billion acquisition of digital mapmaker Navteq Corp.

The deal avoided an expanded in-depth antitrust review largely because the companies had no overlapping products. Although vertical mergers rarely alarm antitrust regulators, some lawyers speculated that concerns about Nokia's ability to withhold mapping data from other makers of handheld devices could cause worry.
 
Apparently, however, those concerns weren't enough to prompt a longer second request for information.
 
The Nokia deal followed by only six weeks the announcement that handheld positioning device maker TomTom NV bought Navteq's largest competitor, Tele Atlas NV of the Netherlands for about $4.3 billion.

Chicago-based Navteq has roughly an 85% market share of the U.S. market in navigation data and roughly two-thirds of the European market. It sells the data to customers that in turn disseminate it to tourists, lost motorists and the like through computers, Web sites and, increasingly, by handheld devices and vehicle-based devices. It generated 2006 revenues of $582 million and has 168 offices in 30 countries.

U.S. regulators have now approved both deals, with the European Commission formally opening a review on the TomTom deal. In a statement, EC officials said the Tele Atlas transaction could be anticompetitive because "Tele Atlas is one of only two producers of navigable digital maps offering a complete coverage of Europe and North America."

With that statement on the record, EC would likely conduct a similar review of the takeover of Navteq.

---

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)

Please only click "Post" once. It may take a few moments to process.