OZ Communications Could Help Nokia In North America
Nokia has announced that its acquisition of Canada-based OZ Communications is now complete. The company, including 220 employees, is now fully owned and operated by Nokia. So…who is OZ Communications? If you’ve used a branded cell phone in the U.S. in the past half-decade or so, you’re likely familiar with the built-in instant messaging application. It typically only supports MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL, and looks rather bubbly. That’s OZ Communications. They supply the built-in IM client on most carrier-branded handsets in the U.S.
So, why do you care? Well, Nokia historically has a tough time building relationships with the U.S. carriers - specifically AT&T and T-Mobile, since they use GSM. Both AT&T and T-Mobile charge instant messaging as SMS - an outgoing IM is a single SMS, and an incoming one is another SMS. Thus, an entire conversation might cost you over $2, at the industry rate of $.20/message. Or, you could simply pay for a monthly messaging bundle, which increases your ARPU.
Basically, Nokia just bought its way into the U.S. market, and into a very strategic position with AT&T, T-Mobile, and others. And they get technology to build a stellar IM client into their unbranded S40-powered featurephones. Completely brilliant. But that’s not all - OZ Communications, lately, has added other communication tools - including webmail and social networks like MySpace - to its repertoire. For us in the United States, Nokia now owns one of the significant sources of data-based revenue for AT&T and T-Mobile, which gives them a really strong leverage tool to get high-end handsets such as the E71, N85, and N79 onto AT&T’s shelves.
While I personally am not a fan of branded handsets, I *am* a fan of Nokia, and I’m also a fan of seeing more US 3G phones be made available. I’m also a big fan of Nokia getting more market share in the U.S., as that would make us more likely to get proper support, so that things like the piss-poor firmware support of the N95-3 won’t happen anymore. Also, there’s a small part of me that hopes Nokia will hammer out a *really* cool version of OZ’s IM app that will do MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, and Gtalk, for S60. Although, I’m pretty happy with Slick IM across all my phones.
What are your thoughts? Is Nokia really trying in the U.S., or is this OZ Communications purchase just for something else?
Yet the strong US presence just makes it a better deal (also not crippling a function with carriers).