Digia Oyj - Company Announcement

DIGIA TO ACQUIRE QT COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE LICENSING BUSINESS FROM NOKIA

Helsinki, 2011-03-07 10:00 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 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
Key media


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.