Switzerland's largest operator Swisscom has bought the mobile content and marketing specialist Minick for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition moves Swisscom closer to its strategic goal of strengthening its activities in the value added services sector and to become more directly active in content. Minick's main business is building and managing WAP portals, but it also builds applications such as M-Voting, Teletext-Chats, SMS and MMS. The latter makes Minick an important player in themobile marketing space.Swisscom has just under 4.5 million subscribers and runs offices in Switzerland, Germany, the UK and Spain. It is currently 25 per cent owned by Vodafone and has licensed the Vodafone Live! portal and it content deck. Swisscom is rumoured to be in the process of buying back its shares from the UK operator.
Minick, originally founded in Finland, was formerly 50 per cent owned by the video games publisher THQ (which runs the wholly mobile division THQ Wireless), with the remainin g half held by the management and present and former employees. Swisscom has acquired all Minick's shares.
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