As strange as it sounds, Tanla Mobile has said on its earnings conference call that despite the company having expected a very large impact (decimation, frankly) after Nokia having offered maps for free. The announcement of free maps from Nokia would have put a large red strike-out across Tanla's revenue expectations of “EUR 20-22 million this financial year (2009-10), EUR 65 million next year and EUR 125 million in FY 2012 in this specific vertical.” But, according to the management on its earnings conference call - "we are yet to witness that. In fact, we are still seeing license manager volumes remain as where they are on a monthly basis, and we expect to see that for the next quarter as well. Where we are seeing a little bit of an impact is in the transaction business where because Nokia Maps is now free, we are seeing drop in transaction numbers that were coming from the Maps business. On the payment side, we have not felt as severe an impact or any impact from the change in Nokia strategy towards free Maps strategy and we are continuing to see the license manager ship on all S60, S40 handsets." Tanla's license volumes are in the 4-5 million mark, and they expect the same in the next quarter. So are people still buying maps, despite being free? Tanla has two revenue sources from the licence manager for Nokia maps - license revenue and transaction revenue. The company said that their prime driver…
