DIGIA TO ACQUIRE QT COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE LICENSING BUSINESS FROM NOKIA

Digia Plc STOCK EXCHANGE RELEASE MARCH 7, 2011 AT 11:00 A.M.

DIGIA TO ACQUIRE QT COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE LICENSING BUSINESS FROM NOKIA
 

Digia to support broader use of Qt in consumer electronics, industry equipment, and other embedded and desktop software solutions.
 

Digia Plc. (DIG1V) has today signed an agreement with Nokia Corporation to buy Qt commercial licensing and service business. Nokia will continue to develop Qt technology, but in the future, Digia will be responsible for its commercial licensing and service business.
 

In connection with the deal Digia plans to employ 19 persons from Nokia working in Silicon Valley in the U.S. and in Oslo, Norway. Digia will establish subsidiaries in the United States (Digia USA Inc.), and in Norway (Digia Norway AS). The recruited personnel will transfer to these subsidiaries.
 

The majority of the related turnover comes from product-based, scalable business. About half of the turnover will come from the North American market. Other major markets are Central Europe and the United Kingdom. Digia estimates the impact of the transaction to its 2011 earnings to be neutral, due to the cost of the takeover and deferred sales. On subsequent years, Digia estimates the business to grow profitably.
 

Under the agreement, about 3500 commercial Qt customer enterprises are targeted to be transferred to Digia. Among others, the client organisations are operating in the following industries: consumer electronics, industry automation, media, finance, energy, aviation and defence. For the majority, the transferring clientele represents new customer base for Digia and will strengthen Digia’s Qt business outside the mobile industry.
 

Digia aims to expand and develop the acquired product business, in particular with productized support services that complement the offering, and extra features based on customer needs. The business transaction will support Digia’s strategic objective to grow its turnover coming from international product based business.
 

Per agreement with Nokia, the aim is to transfer the Qt business to Digia by the end of March 2011. 

Digia Plc


Juha Varelius
President and CEO

For more information
Harri Paani, SVP, Competences, Digia Plc. Tel. +358 40 502 0410

Distribution
NASDAQ OMX Helsinki
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Qt in brief
Qt is an application and UI framework, which enables powerful software and graphical user interface creation in different environments. It includes a cross platform class library that supports multiple operating systems (e.g. Windows, Mac OS and Linux) as well as tools to develop software. With the excellent application programming interface it is easy and fast to develop applications that work without any modifications on different platforms. The development of Qt started in 1991 and with Qt, a wide range of different applications has been developed world wide.