Nokia has announced plans to sell its distressed medical technology business to Eric Carreel, cofounder of Withings, the French startup that Nokia bought in 2016.
The terms of the agreement have not been announced, but the Finnish technological giant You are surely having a substantial loss in the sale. Nokia bought Withings two years ago for $ 191 million, before changing the brand of the startup's products (including an intelligent scale and several well-received exercise watches) as part of its new "Digital Health" business in 2017. [19659003] However, the repressed Withings clearly, the products were not generating enough money for Nokia, and in October 2017, the company announced a write-off of € 141 million ($ 164 million) in assets. This was followed by the launch of a "strategic review" of the division in February, with an internal note obtained by The Verge showing that executives thought there was no "way" for the business to become in "significant". part "of Nokia.
All this bad news was confirmed in the company's first quarter earnings this year.The Digital Health business bought only € 16 million ($ 20 million) in revenue, compared to net sales of € 4.9 billion ($ 5.9 billion) for the rest of Nokia.
As the company noted in a press release, selling Digital Health to Carreel fits Nokia's new approach of becoming primarily a "company to company and licensing. "That means leaving any consumer market while concentrating on selling telecommunications, hardware (Nokia is the third supplier after Huawei and Ericsson) and licensing its huge patent portfolio (accumulated during its time as the king of the mobile phones in the 90s and 2000s.)
Nokia says the sale is expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of this year, while the future of the Withings brand is unknown. [19659007]