New Companies Invest HERE for Asia-Pacific Autonomous Ventures

Two Japanese companies will jointly take a 30% ownership stake in Netherlands-based HERE. Mitsubishi Corporation and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation will acquire partial ownership stake to “broaden shareholder structure to support HERE’s ambitions to accelerate growth in new industries and markets,” according to a company statement.
HERE is a location data and technology platform, providing a development environment (HERE Workspace), a data exchange (HERE Marketplace), map creation and visualization capabilities (HERE Studio) and a set of location services (HERE Location Services). These capabilities leverage the Reality Index, a rich source of location contextual data that captures relationships between places and things. The company has more than 9,000 employees across 56 countries.
HERE captures location content such as road networks, buildings, parks and traffic patterns. It then sells or licenses that mapping content, along with map related navigation and location services to other businesses such as Alpine, Garmin, BMW, Oracle and Amazon.com. HERE has maps of nearly 200 countries, offers voice-guided navigation in 94 countries, provides live traffic information in 33 countries and has indoor maps available for about 49,000 unique buildings in 45 countries. The company is also working on self-driving technology.
Edzard Overbeek, CEO HERE Technologies, said “Mitsubishi Corporation and NTT share our vision of enabling an autonomous world for everyone and believe in our ability to harness our location platform to address major global challenges like urban congestion, supply chain inefficiency, and sustainable resource usage just to name a few.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2020, subject to regulatory approval. The parties have agreed not to disclose the financial details of the transaction. Upon completion of the transaction, HERE would have nine direct and indirect shareholders: Audi, Bosch, BMW Group, Continental, Intel Capital, MC, Mercedes-Benz, NTT and Pioneer.
HERE roots date back to U.S.-based Navteq in 1985, which was acquired by Finland-based Nokia in 2007.