Veon Acquired by Philips Electronics

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (www.philips.com) announced on Monday that it has reached a preliminary agreement to acquire Veon, a provider of clickable, interactive streaming video. Veon also provides a platform to enable advertisers, content developers and service providers to transform existing, one-dimensional Internet content into rich multimedia experiences.

Financial details of the transaction were not officially disclosed. But an Israeli financial news Web site, TheMarker.com, reports that the value of the deal is below $120 million, which is the sum of Veon's last funding round.

Veon is based in Herszliva, Israel with a corporate office in San Francisco. After the acquisition, Veon will be incorporated into MP4Net, a business unit of Philips Consumer Electronics responsible for multimedia streaming and content delivery over IP.

"This acquisition will strengthen Philips' lead in the emerging market of MPEG-4 delivery to various consumer platforms, including PCs, Set-Top-Boxes, PDAs, and mobile devices," says Ahmad Ouri, vice president and general manager of Philips MP4Net. "Veon's capabilities will not only enable us to extend our product offering to cover far more of the content production and delivery chain, but to also strengthen Philips' vision of the Internet as a broad, rich and full-fledged multimedia e-commerce medium."