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Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz Conclude the Acquisition of HERE

The decision to finalize the acquisition of HERE by the three car giants comes after approvals from all competent antitrust authorities were received. Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz insisted right from the start that all three companies would have an equal share in this service and none of them would seek to acquire a majority interest.
Here logo 1 photo
Photo: Nokia
The talks with the Finnish company started off at the end of spring this year, and after heavy negotiations, they sealed the deal for 2.8 billion dollars, even if at the beginning Nokia wanted around 4.1 billion dollars.

It is important to note that HERE is in fact a high-definition mapping company that was created after Nokia bought off the maps unit of Navteq, a Chicago-based company, back in 2008, for a staggering 8.1 billion dollars.

After taking over some location technology companies, it managed to create the best mapping system in the world according to some people. This service was also so good because of the fleet of vehicles fitted with cameras and LIDAR, which travel around 50,000 km on six continents every week, as well as GPS data received from the trucking companies Nokia collaborated with in the past.

HERE collects data at a rate of 100 billion points per month and uses a mix of predictive analytics to help predict traffic up to 12 hours ahead of time. 50 countries are using this service’s real-time traffic in order to know about the current traffic conditions and prevent unwanted incidents.

Four out of five cars are using these maps, from BMW and Jaguar to Land Rover and Toyota. That means around 10 million cars are using HERE. This service also provides routing, traffic and local search services, along with 2.7 million updates every day and voice guided navigation in more than 50 languages.

After knowing this, it is easy to understand why all three premium carmakers wanted HERE so bad. In fact, the battle was even fiercer than it looks, because other companies, among which we find Uber and Chinese search giant Baidu, were interested in HERE at the beginning as well.
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