HTC Buys Mobile Apps Maker Abaxia

Cellphone maker HTC Corp. announced Tuesday that it has purchased Abaxia, a Paris-based company that develops software for mobile and handset operators. Abaxia's software promotes and monetizes cellular operator and handset manufacturer services.

Terms of the deal were not officially released, but HTC is believed to be paying about $13 million.

"The addition of Abaxia deepens and broadens our software development capabilities so that we can innovate at an even faster pace," said Peter Chou, CEO of HTC Corp., in a statement.

Founded in 2001, Abaxia's products include Mobile Portal, an embedded application that lets carriers add services and information to a phone's desktop; Mobile Finder, which brings device and web search to the idle screen so that users can find phone features and contacts as well as general content. The Abaxia Open Platform is a server solution that activates the mobile device's idle screen in order to access content, search and advertising. It also includes back-office tools for statistics and analytics.

HTC is likely to integrate all of the Abaxia services into its Sense user interface, which runs on top of mobile operating systems like Android. Industry observers say Abaxia has experience developing across several different platforms, and the acquisition will help HTC differentiate its products as mobile phone content becomes increasingly more important.

"One of the trends is developing more of a smartphone user interface that goes on top of the OS, whether it's Windows 7 or Google,'' said Ken Hyers, a senior analyst at Technology Business Research, Inc. With Sense, HTC has an established UI, but in order to further develop it, the company needs additional software to enhance it, he said.

Hyers speculated that HTC will want to be part of the growing movement to put all social networking applications into a single stream so they can be combined. "What it comes down to is they're trying to … look for software that will allow them to be creative in how they enhance the user interface."

HTC and Abaxia have had a close working relationship in the past and their businesses complement one another, said CEO Cedric Mangaud.

According to its website, Abaxia has also worked with major mobile operators including Vodafone and SFR and other handset manufacturers that rival HTC such as Nokia, Motorola, LG, and Samsung.