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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.
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