Samsung, Nokia heads agree to software collaboration

Samsung Electronics and Nokia, two of the world’s top makers of cellular telephones, have reached a basic agreement to collaborate on software and market development for cellular handsets and smartphones.

The agreement was reached last week during a meeting between Kun Hee Lee, chairman and chief executive officer of Seoul-based Samsung Electronics, and Jorma Ollila, chief executive officer of Nokia, at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, a spokeswoman for Samsung said Wednesday.

“They agreed on the basic concept of mutual cooperation about software development and new, future market generation,” said Samsung spokeswoman Seung Youn Kim. The informal discussions did not include any specific agreements but did lay the ground for more formal arrangements to be reached in the future in areas including operating system and application design.

Also included in the talks was the possibility of joint development of the market for smart phones, said Kim. In countries with high penetration of cellular telephones, companies like Nokia and Samsung are turning to advanced devices such as smart phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) to help increase sales, and growing this market will help both companies, Kim said.

Nokia is the world’s No. 1 maker of cellular telephones and shipped 38.2 million units during the first quarter of this year for a 35.5 percent market share, according to a market estimate from IDC. Samsung Electronics was ranked third with a 12.3 percent market share behind second-placed Motorola.

The two companies already have some links in the software field. Samsung Electronics holds a stake alongside Nokia in Symbian, a London-based smart phone operating system developer, and has licensed Nokia’s Series 60 platform for use on the system. Earlier this year Samsung Electronics unveiled its first prototype based on the Symbian.

But this is not Samsung’s only direction in the smart phone field. The company holds the distinction of being the only major cellular telephone maker to have licensed all four competing smart phone and PDA platforms: Symbian, Palm Inc.’s Palm OS, and Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system and Windows Powered Smartphone platform. Devices based on the latter three platforms are already on the international market.