Nokia 2014 Annual Report Download - page 31

Business overview
29NOKIA IN 2014
Market overview
The market for location services has
undergone signicant change in recent years.
Access to location services has broadened
from portable navigation devices (“PNDs”) and
those in cars to multiple devices and screens,
including smartphones. Location is now a key
element of the mobile and web experience,
whether to seek live subway departures, check
restaurant ratings, share location-tagged
images on social networks, or track pending
online deliveries.
The industry is also delivering location
experiences in a dierent way. In the past,
static maps were often provided on disc
or pre-installed on a device, whereas today
users are increasingly being delivered content
and services over the internet in real time,
as a result of cloud-based technologies.
Companies in the automotive, enterprise,
mobile and broader consumer electronics
industries are already making considerable
investments in and around location services,
and location is and will be a critical element in,
for example, the areas of wearable computing,
augmented reality, personal activity tracking,
connected cars, and automated driving.
Business overview
HERE is the leading company in the location
intelligence industry, delivering highly precise
and up-to-date maps, a location platform,
and location experiences across multiple
screens and operating systems. Built on more
than 25 years of experience in cartography
and drawing on more than 80 000 sources
of data, HERE oers maps for more than
190 countries, voice guided navigation for
99 countries in more than 50 languages
and live trac information for 44 countries.
We believe HERE’s map is the best digital
representation of the real world in terms of
accuracy, coverage, richness and freshness.
HERE’s global team of geographic analysts
build and maintain the core map of HERE.
HERE also has a eet of sophisticated data
collection vehicles, which help produce maps
with centimeter-level precision. Altogether,
HERE employs approximately 6 000 people,
with its major development sites located in
Berlin, Germany and in Chicago, United States.
HERE’s customer base includes many of
theworld’s leading companies from the
automotive, mobile, internet and consumer
electronics industries. In the automotive
space, HERE is the clear market leader,
providing maps for the embedded navigation
systems in four out of every ve new vehicles
sold in North America and Europe. In 2014,
this amounted to more than 13 million new
vehicle licenses. Our customers can license all
or parts of the HERE oering: map content,
HERE’s location platform, or specic location
experiences. The platform is device and
operating system agnostic and includes
functionalities such as routing, trac and
positioning, a digital 3D reference model of
the world, the development tools with which
customers can create their own experiences
on top of our map, and the analytical tools
tomake sense of location-based data. The
exibility in being able to choose between all
or specic parts of HERE’s oering enables
HERE to serve a broad range of customers
with dierent business models and needs.
Nokia launched HERE as its brand in 2012,
prior to which it was already an established
business operating under the Nokia name.
The business has developed organically and
through acquisitions, the most signicant
ofwhich were the acquisition of location
software provider Gate5 in 2006, digital
mapping provider NAVTEQ in 2008, and
data capture company earthmine in 2012.
For over 25 years, HERE has been driving
fundamental changes to its map. HERE’s
predecessor NAVTEQ was an early pioneer in
digital mapping, and in 2006 Nokia became
the rst company to launch a mobile phone
with in-built GPS. HERE is transforming its
map from a static, two-dimensional form akin
to a digital version of a paper map and further
into a dynamic three-dimensional digital
representation of the world, rich in real-time
and contextually-relevant information drawn
from both real-world and digital sources.
In recent years, amid advances in wireless
connectivity and a growing need for
ever-more-relevant data, HERE has also been
driving a fundamental change to the way it
builds and delivers map and location data.
Increasingly, HERE’s location experiences
are powered by its location cloud, which
processes and delivers data to smartphones,
tablets, in-car navigation systems and other
devices over the cloud in real time, reducing
the heavy computing needs of the devices.
Leading market position
Many of the world’s
leading carmakers are
including HERE map
data in models they
are launching in 2015,
demonstrating that
HERE is well positioned
for future developments
in motoring.
“Location services will be
acritical element in, for
example, the areas of
wearable computing,
augmented reality,
personal activity
tracking, connected
cars, and automated
driving.”