Nokia looking for online acquisitions

Nokia is far from finished building up its internet offering and is seeking further acquisitions to speed up the roll out of new services, Niklas Savander, the head of the unit, said in an interview.

Nokia bought US digital maps firm Navteq for $8.1 billion in July and has acquired ten smaller firms to jump-start its Internet services business as the growth in the mobile phone market is set to stall.

"We're not done," Savander told Reuters when asked about further acquisition plans.

Likely targets could be small companies which develop services Nokia itself plans to offer in the future - enabling the Finnish firm to roll those services out faster, he said.

In a media event later today, Nokia will introduce The Files on Ovi service, based on the acquisition of Avvenu last year, which allows users to store files on the Web so that they are always accessible, an increasingly common service offered by Internet firms like Google and Yahoo.

Nokia introduced a new personal information management (PIM) synchronization service for calendar, contacts, notes and tasks between Nokia phones and its internet services site - similar to Apple and Microsoft offerings.

"We obviously think there is genuine consumer demand. Information that is contained on device is becoming more and more critical to people," Savander said in a recent interview scheduled for publishing today.

"We are incrementally, step-by-step, building up the offering that has to be matched with demand," he said.

Nokia has not unveiled user numbers for its Internet services, but it created April-June revenues of €119 million ($170.7 million), up 42 per cent from the previous quarter.

The growth in Nokia's core handset business is much more subdued, and the company warned last week it would lose market share in July-September as it aims to stay away from heated pricing battle.

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