Purple Labs Completes $32M Acquisition of Openwave's Mobile Browser Business

(Business News & Technology News, 7 Jul 2008)

Linux-based mobile software developer Purple Labs has completed its acquisition of the mobile client software business of California-based Openwave Systems, in an asset sale valued at more than $32 million. The browser and messaging products acquired in the deal are among the best-selling mobile applications worldwide, having already shipped in more than 1.5 billion mobile phones.

Following the acquisition, Purple Labs now supplies mobile browser software to all of the top five phone manufacturers, which together produce over 80 percent of the world's mobile phones.

Under the terms of the deal, Purple Labs has acquired the products, software code, patents and customer contracts of the Openwave business. For the quarter ending in March, Openwave had reported $11.1 million in revenues from these customer contracts, including software license fees and related engineering services.

According to Simon Wilkinson, Purple Labs CEO, the company will continue to maintain the existing products, and invest in the next-generation Surfer browser and other advanced mobile Internet technologies. In addition to the California-based development team that Purple Labs acquired from Openwave, the company already has 75 engineers at its development centre in Chambéry, France and plan to grow this team aggressively.

"Further, we plan to reuse many of the Openwave technologies in our Purple Labs Linux platform. We are focused exclusively on the requirements of LiMo Foundation members such as Vodafone and Orange—and believe that this will ultimately create new market opportunities for our manufacturer customers," adds Wilkinson.

Purple Labs has appointed Gordon Tsang to be general manager for the browser/messaging business unit. Tsang heads a global sales and engineering support team with offices in California, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Manchester, England. About 80 employees are expected to move from Openwave to Purple Labs.

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