NOKIA lures Trolls for $153.3 million

2008-01-29

According to filings with the Oslo Børs, Norway's stock exchange, major Trolltech (TROLL.OL) shareholders have pre-accepted a tender offer by Nokia.

The Deal
Trolltech CEO and co-founder Haavard Nord (7,250,120 shares), board member Eirik Chambe-Eng through his Vuonislahti Invest AS (7,188,120 shares), Teknoinvest and funds managed by Index Ventures, (9,693,018 shares) have agreed to tender their shares. An aside: Index Ventures is also a shareholder in MySQL which is being acquired by Sun for 1 billion USD.

Lars Knoll, VP of Engineering (75,200 shares) and Volker Hilsheimer, employee representative on the board of Trolltech, (56,500 shares) have also pre-accepted Nokia's offer.

According to Thompson Financial, Nokia's cash bid of 16 Norwegian Kroner per share values Trolletech at around 843 million Norwegian Kroner, or 105 million Euro, and represents a premium of 6 NKR per share to Trolltech's closing price in Oslo on Friday. TROLL closed Friday's regular trade at $35.08, down $1.4, on a volume of 31.28 million shares. It's shares were up 57% on Monday after the announcement. The company operated at a loss in 2006 and 2007.

Some Background
Looking beyond the Symbian and Windows CE mobile operating systems, Nokia was first attracted to Linux desktop GNOME's GTK+ library, in part because its rival desktop KDE library Qt was maintained by a sole company, Trolltech, rather than a distributed group. GNOME's origin ten years ago was as a freely licensed alternative to KDE. This distinction helped founder Miguel de Icaza attract a sizeable and energetic young base of developers.

After heated discussion in the developer community, Trolltech eventually released its Qt toolkit under the GPL 2, dual licensing the code in 2000 and removing most of the license distinction which GNOME held. Recently, Trolltech announced that its Qt cross-platform development framework was now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3.)

Quick Analysis
Nokia's strategy to broaden its revenue model to services such as Ovi, makes cross platform delivery and developer mindshare a key dependency to its future. With Trolltech's Ot in hand (and on its line of mobile handsets) together with GTK+ based Maemo on its Linux Internet WiFi tablets,) the former rubber boot manufacturer musters a new challenge to other players in the wireless and WiMax market. Simultaneously, the company strenghtens its corporate leadership role in open source technology.

Dean Bubley writes in his Disruptive Wireless blog:

This isn't a battle for the smartphone space, but featurephones.