SysOpen, Digia, YOMI – A Circle of Success?

by: Goeksen Iyikoey

TABLE OF CONTENT

1 INTRODUCTION  1

2 SYMBIAN  3

2.1 What is Symbian?  3
2.2 Users and partners  3

3 ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS 5

3.1 Reasons and advantages 5
3.2 Risks and disadvantages 6

4 SYSOPEN AND DIGIA MERGER  7

4.1 Company information 7
4.2 Customers and partners  7
4.3 Status and Intensity of the Merger 8
4.4 Purposes of the Merger 9
4.5 Possible Future Benefits Deriving from the Merger  11

5 SYSOPEN DIGIA ACQUISITION OF YOMI SOFTWARE 15

5.1 Company 15
5.2 Customers and partners  15
5.3 Reasons for acquisition 16

6 FUTURE ASPECTS AND STRATEGIES 17

6.1 How is the Business going on?  17
6.2 Key Questions in the Further Development in Doing Business 17
6.3 A Vision for SysOpen Digia?  18

7 CONCLUSIONS 20

REFERENCES  22

1 INTRODUCTION

The smartphone market is one of the youngest and most interesting markets in the ICT sector. The market is establishing itself at the moment, but we do not know yet where is it going, is it going to be successful, who are going to be the big players? A trend is strongly going into the direction of using smartphones which offer more benefits then standard ‘normal’ mobiles. But it is highly depending on other developments as well: is the content offered interesting enough to attract the customer’s attention? Is the technology needed to offer the service stable enough, will it be acceptable and affordable? These are important questions for the success which the future will give the answers to – for now the perspective for the market is excellent – but the industry has to be careful to not having to live another WAP-nightmare.

SysOpen and Digia are two players on the content delivery side of the smartphone market. Both located in Finland, they merged their operations in 2005, followed by the acquisition of another Finnish company on the smartphone market, YOMI Software. The main part of this term paper is the evaluation of those mergers and acquisition (M&A’s). After an introductory view on M&A’s in theory, where purposes, risks, advantages and disadvantages are discusses, we will get deep into the M&A’s within and around SysOpen Digia and figure out: How do those companies stand to each other (figure 1), what are the purposes behind their M&A activities and what benefits and future opportunities does SysOpen Digia have.

Figure 1: SysOpen, Digia, YOMI – a circle of success? [figure only in downloadfile]

We will take the suggestions on the M&A activities one step further afterwards by coming closer to an answer on the question if SysOpen, Digia and YOMI can build a ‘circle of success’? Therefore, we will discuss about the future opportunities of SysOpen Digia on the smartphone market. The investigations will offer a possible scenario where SysOpen Digia is going to and how their future positioning within the market could look like.

2 SYMBIAN

One of SysOpen Digia’s core competences is Symbian based software development for smartphones. That’s why we think it’s necessary to introduce what Symbian is, who is it competing with and who are the partners and customers. After these acquisitions and mergers we assume that the whole company’s Symbian operations will move to Digia, since it was the strongest player in that field before merger and acquisition.

2.1 What is Symbian?

Symbian is an independent private software licensing company, which was established in 1998. It develops and supplies advanced, open and standard operating systems (OS) for smartphones. Headquarter is located in UK and it has 750 workers in offices located in Sweden, Japan, UK and the USA and a development centre in Bangalore. In order to work, mobile phones and other portable devices need to have a platform over the operating system. Software developers like SysOpen Digia are making those platforms to phones. Symbian OS is advanced and open operating system licensed by the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturers. It is designed especially for advanced 2G, 2.5G and 3G mobile phones. Symbian OS combines the power of an integrated applications environment with mobile telephony, bringing advanced data services to the mass market.

2.2 Users and partners

Symbian is widely used. Its ownership and licensees are shown in the pictures 1 and 2. By operating system, Symbian grew 201% on year 2004. It now has a market share of 50%, compared to 30% the year before. Microsoft has 20% share and Palm Source 20.2%.

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