According to The Register, Nokia is in talks to acquire a stake in Facebook with a view to “porting the social network on to Nokia handsets in a major way”. The key point of surprise is that while Nokia has close to a Billion paying customers and Facebook has only 50 million (who hardly pay a bean) Nokia is likely to pay Facebook for the privilege!
So why is Facebook worth so much?
The answer, of course, is that it’s not – the large valuations on Facebook are complete nonsense.
Microsoft paid $240M for a 1.6% share of Facebook to keep Google out and nothing more!
But that’s quite a business model for Facebook – keep finding major players in other markets willing to sign up “exclusive” deals. 240 mil here, another 150 mil there would be enough to keep the Z boy in business cards for life.
So Nokia is either being very clever or very stupid, it’s a shame it’s not clear which.
But I wonder if Zuckerberg understands the irony of running a social website funded my companies who just want to exclude each other.