Nokia completes the $3B sale of its Here mapping unit to car consortium

Update, December 4: Nokia has completed the sale of Here.

Nokia’s plan to offload its Here mapping unit remains firmly on track, as the former mobile phone giant has revealed it expects the sale to conclude tomorrow (December 4). The deal was initially expected to close in the first quarter of 2016, so this is earlier than expected — but it has now received all regulatory approvals.

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Following months of rumors, the Finnish tech company confirmed its intentions to sell Here to a consortium of car companies for €2.8 billion ($3.07 billion) back in August. The suitors? Audi, BMW, and Daimler.

Here was already powering the mapping technology for many companies, including Amazon, Bing, Garmin, Yahoo, and Chinese Internet giant Baidu, while it has been a major player in the automotive realm for a while too.

It’s estimated that Here powers around 80 percent of in-car GPS navigation systems, and more than 50 percent of the unit’s 2014 revenue stemmed from the automobile industry. Indeed, all three consortium members use Here already, so the deal made a great deal of sense. A number of other companies had reportedly shown interest, however, including Uber and even Facebook, which recently switched to using Here maps.

With the sale of Here, this represents the third major piece of acquisition news from Nokia in 18 months, kicking off with the sale of its mobile phone division to Microsoft for $7 billion, which was followed by the revelation that Nokia was to acquire France’s Alcatel-Lucent — Nokia investors recently gave the go-ahead to buy the company in a $18 billion deal.