Yahoo-Nokia Deal Targets Emerging Markets
The partnership announced Monday between Yahoo and Nokia will give Yahoo greater access to those “new to the net” and the vast pool of cell-phone users in emerging world, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told CNBC Monday.
In short: Nokia will integrate its Ovi mapsacross all Yahoo properties and Yahoo will the provider for Nokia’s Ovi mail and Ovi chat.
“First, the application that people normally use when they come to the Internet through mobile is chat, because that’s how they can start communicating and get used to the Internet,” said Bartz.
“It [the partnership with Nokia] really takes a technical burden off of us and gives us access to a lot of people.”
The first of the companies’ combined services will roll out by the end of this year and it will be completely integrated by mid-2011. Bartz declined to discuss the partnership's financials.
Both companies are powerhouses in their own right. More people use Yahoo mail than either Gmail, Google’s email system, or that of Microsoft's Hotmail.com. Nokia is the undisputed leader in the mass market cell-phone arena: Last year the telecommunications giant, which started in Finland, sold 430 million handsets.
Nokia’s CEO and president, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, noted that the deal was important for Nokia in that “we get greater scale, stronger web presence and this is an acknowledgement that Nokia is a force on the Web in addition to being a force in mobile.”
Nokia has spent some $54 billion in the last years on R&D and acquisitions to help it break into the high-end telecommunications field and to capture some of the market share held by Applein the United States. He said the new partnership with Yahoo is helpful in broadening his company's reach.
He declined to discuss Nokia's lawsuit against Apple in which Nokia claims Apple's infringement on its patents and intellectual property.
