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Article Excerpt
More than 6 million handsets featuring the Symbian OS shipped last year. WBT's Tim Bresien takes a look at the company's prospects for 2004, a critical year for the smartphone market.
If London-based Symbian Ltd. was a traditional venture-funded startup, this would be the time that investors would demand to extract a return on their dollars, pounds, and Euros. You see, many private venture funds mature over a period of five years, and their limited partners expect to find that several companies in a given portfolio have matured to the point of becoming an attractive IPO candidate or an acquisition target. In investor jargon, this is known as a "liquidity event." One or two of the companies might generate a 10x or 20x return, and make up for the majority of investments in the portfolio that inevitably go by the wayside.
But Symbian was never a traditional startup. It was never beholden to the timing of venture capitalists. This proved to be fortunate for them as the collapsing expectations of "overnight 3G" in Europe might have caused a venture-funded company to wither on the vine and never see subsequent rounds of capital. Now six years in the making, and "7 million lines of code later" as Symbian's Peter Bancroft is fond of saying, the company remains a privately held consortium of sorts. It is owned in varying degrees by some of the largest handset makers in the business: Nokia (32.2%); Siemens (4.8%); Samsung (5.0%); Ericsson (17.5%); Sony Ericsson (1.5%); Panasonic (7.9%); and UK-based Psion (31.1%). Psion's EPOC operating system provided the inspiration for what is today's open smartphone operating system: the Symbian OS v7.0s.
Symbian also remains on target to profit from the market segment it has all but defined since 1998. You could say that they've been pushing the envelope for half a decade now. The time has come for them to sign it, seal it, and--for their shareholders, licensees, and mobile operator partners--deliver compelling smartphone products that...
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