The French mobile music service cashed out big time…I’ll have more details later…Openwave Systems , the mobile browser company, has bought out French-European mobile contentcompany Musiwave...Openwave will acquire all outstanding shares of Musiwave for a total purchase price of approximately euro 99.5 million and a contingent earnout of up to an additional euro 15 million. This equates to approximately $121 million, and an additional $18 million respectively, based on the Euro-US Dollar exchange rate of September 23, 2005.
The official logic: “With Musiwave, Openwave will enable operators to deliver a broad range of high value music services and associated content, quickly and safely to their customers. The combination of Openwave’s world class data services software and client experience in over a billion handsets, with Musiwave’s market-leading music services is a compelling, complete solution for operators; they now have a partner with proven global expertise to deliver the latest music services and associated content to a wide variety of devices.”
Openwave anticipates that Musiwave will contribute approximately $50 to $55 million of revenue for Openwave’s calendar year 2006