TELECOMS & MOBILE
Siemens enters Symbian consortium
23-04-2002
by Paula Mythen
Siemens Information and Communication Mobile (Siemens IC Mobile) has taken a five percent stake in Symbian for STG14.5 million.
Symbian is a software licensing company, owned by Ericsson, Matsushita, Nokia, Psion and Sony-Ericsson. Its main product Symbian OS, is an open standard operating system for data-enabled mobile phones.
Psion remains the majority shareholder of Symbian with 26.6 percent, while Nokia, Motorola and Sony-Ericsson each hold 20 percent. Matsushita (Panasonic) has an 8.4 percent shareholding while Siemens IC Mobile now owns five percent. As a shareholder Siemens will sit on Symbian's supervisory board contributing its experience to future technical, product and strategy development of Symbian OS.
The deal drove shares in Psion up four percent in London to STG0.585, partly because Psion will recognise a balance sheet gain of STG3.3 million during the year thanks to the Siemens investment.
The deal will also do no favours for Microsoft or Palm, Symbian's main competitors in the mobile OS market. In recent months Symbian partners have been engaging in efforts to promote the technology, which lags behind both Microsoft Pocket PC and Palm in terms of take-up.
Nokia has started several initiatives including a competition for developing Symbian applications on its series of smartphones and Sony-Ericsson has released versions of Symbian of some of its new devices. And in February, Symbian received a boost when six new semiconductor companies -- Agilent Technologies, Epson, Parthus, Philips Semiconductors, Samsung and STMicroelectronics -- announced they would integrate the Symbian OS with their chips that use an ARM core.
The addition of Siemens to the team will almost certainly prove to be another feather in the cap of the Symbian team.
But despite the recent developments at Symbian, International Data Corp forecasts that Symbian-based devices shipped to the company's Asia-Pacific region, it weakest market, will decline at a compound annual rate of 18 percent between 2000 and 2005. Meanwhile Palm devices have a compound annual growth rate of 51 percent, and Pocket PC devices 62 percent for the same period.
But most analysts agree that domination in the next-generation mobile phone, or so-called smartphone, market is still open to competition and that no single OS has proven it has the ability to capture a substantial lead in the sector.
Welcoming Siemens into the fold, David Levin, chief executive officer Symbian also said that the company plans to introduce a variety of smartphones powered by the Symbian OS during the coming year. "The company is well positioned in its market as it moves towards a more commercial focus," he added.
Symbian also announced on Tuesday that it is setting up the "Symbian Platinum Program," a new partnership initiative to promote the creation of software and hardware technology solutions for Symbian OS. Under the program, Symbian will allow members the same access to source code that it has already extended to mobile phone manufacturers.
Companies that have already joined or committed to joining the program this week include Access, AppForge, ARM, Fathammer, Intel Corporation, Intuwave, Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector, M-Systems, Pace Soft Silicon, Picsel, Superscape, STMicroelectronics, Synovial, TapRoot Systems Inc, TestQuest Inc., Texas Instruments and YDC.
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