Jolla’s businesses finally got rid of their Russian owners - "An incredibly long battle of attrition"
Jolla, founded by former Nokia engineers, is seeking to rid itself of its Russian owners from the beginning of 2022. Now the business and staff will be transferred to the former management of the company under a restructuring procedure.
The business operations of technology company Jolla will be transferred to the new company in a business acquisition. The business and personnel will be transferred to the former management of the company in the restructuring process.
Jolla, which specialises in operating systems and automotive software, has sought to divest its Russian owners from the beginning of 2022.
The case was settled last week in court, when the Pirkanmaa District Court confirmed the restructuring plan, which obliges the company to sell its entire business to another company.
“I am very pleased that the Finnish restructuring procedure provided a solution to this impasse,” says Antti Saarnio, chairman of the board of the acquiring company and one of Jolla’s original founding shareholders.
Founded by former Nokia engineers, Jolla has been working with Russian investors and companies since 2016.
“Without this solution, the business could not have continued. In that ownership structure, the company had no conditions to raise capital to grow its business,” says Saarnio.
The long road out of Russian ownership
Saarnio describes the journey out of Russian ownership as “an incredibly long struggle of exhaustion”.
In Russia, Jolla licensed the Sailfish mobile operating system it had developed to Open Mobile Platform, a company founded by Russian businessman Grigory Berezkin. Rostelecom bought Open Mobile Platform and Berezkin’s stake in Jolla in 2018.
“Sometimes we almost ran out of faith. We negotiated for almost a year with the owners to buy out the company, but the negotiations did not progress,” says Saarnio.
“Personally, I don’t think I will ever again get involved in a financing package with Russian investors,” Saarnio says when asked what the events of the past year have taught him.
Saarnio says that Jolla’s turnover last year was almost €5 million, up 40% on the previous year. The company currently employs around 20 people.
According to the new company, the restructuring process resulted in a business transaction, as a result of which the new company will continue to develop and sell Sailfish OS to customers around the world. Jolla’s newest business as an automotive software supplier will be incorporated under its own subsidiary Seafarix, headed by former Jolla sales director Petteri Paasila.
“I have been with Jolla for almost five years. In the last three years we have grown our automotive business significantly. With the new ownership structure, we realised that it makes sense to concentrate the automotive business in our own company. This way we can better serve the needs of the industry,” says Paasila.
These are fantastic news! I am really happy about it. I also like the fact that a new sister company has been created for the automotive developments parts.
I still would love to invest some money in Jolla but I think that is not possible. Anyway, I am still more than happy that there is a future for Jolla, their employees and last but not least SailfishOS. Really great job Jolla! 
So let’s set the sail and take course to the future 
The irony, this Russian sanctioning thing again. I thought they’d be too ashamed to even mentioning it after loosing Nokia and learn from Russia investing in Sailfish protecting vital information space or how you’d call it when rooting for Jolla in its upstream battle vs the Google’s.
Small deemed irrelevant companies are invited to virtue-signal sanction themselves into Russian sanction oblivion while large corporations will continue to benefit and profit from both sides and soon pretend like this aggression in 2014 or 2022 depending on your level of amnesia never happened and continue business as usual in a leveled playfield.
My managerial idea is to write to EU Vd Leyen and Lagarde to demand urgent support for Jolla with those freshly computer generated Eurobillions on two conditions: that Jolla will exist in it’s current niche and will never become a challenge to the Big Tech Hegemony of Google/Apple that is so crucial to the propaganda and new normal order installment. EU can then virtue signal that “yes we have an alternative free and own democratic OS that supports European values to the core”
Not trolling, being seriously realistic here.
Can you write that in English so most of us can make something out of it?
Oh, what a pity you have to leave 
Go Jolla, fair winds and following seas!
I’ll just leave this here:
https://tietopalvelu.ytj.fi/yritys/3381425-4
https://tietopalvelu.ytj.fi/yritys/3379718-3
https://seafarix.com/
This is empty now, but it will be interesting which components will appear at:
“Teknologiayhtiö Jollan entinen johto ostaa Jolla Oy:n liiketoiminnan”:
“We decided to concentrate our automotive expertise in-house to serve our major customers in the industry as efficiently as possible.”
I am so happy. This is good news before Christmas. I wish the Jollyboys and us good luck on the journey and always a hand’s breadth of water under the keel.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Re-organisation of Jolla company - Off-topic discussion
Good news. Let’s hope Jollyboys starts operations soon.
Excellent news! A big thank you to everyone involved for not losing faith and stirring this ship through hell and high water!
May our collective sigh of relief be the gust that propels Sailfish OS into a bright future 
Cool, the new company which seems to be about to replace “Jolla Oy” (still exists; link by mips_tux) is registered as “Jollyboys Oy” (link by attah).
Google translated web-pages of
www.hs.fi/talous/art-2000010019672.html (link by ExTechOp) and www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote/70063024/teknologiayhtio-jollan-entinen-johto-ostaa-jolla-oyn-liiketoiminnan (link by pasik).
What does not become clear in all these articles, unfortunately, is which company holds the rights for AlienDalvik aka AAS (Android App Support). I would assume Seafarix Oy (link by attah), but that is not stated clearly anywhere, only hinted via “We have the ability to offer cutting-edge unique Android Framework integration solutions on top of Linux Platforms” on their webpage. Well, as Seafarix Oy shares the same address with Jollyboys Oy, one may grant the other a resellable licence for little.
And by the way, in one of the articles there’s a photo of Antti Saarnio holding on a phone that surely is a sailfish device 
A big thank you to everyone involved for not losing faith and stirring this ship through hell and high water!
Are you kidding?
I’m a bulletproof AmigaOS4 waiter and User…“when its done” meets “two more weeks”, if you know, you know
Thanks for the great news. Is this the early christmas present we’ve all been waiting for?
I’d like to ask for help understanding this sentence:
What exactly does this mean? The same people that ran Jolla as “Osakeyhtiö” (Limited company?) have now bought it, turning it into a private company?
(I am business language illiterate)
I guess some changes are ahead that affect us as well, but if they are the same people that ran it most of the time it can’t be bad, right?
Congratulations to Jolla - I’m delighted they have succeeded in continueing a viable business.
I do have a question about that viability though:
It is often claimed that Jolla was a car-software company with a mobile-os giftshop attached (amazon joke), if that is true what is the business model for this new mobile-os focused company?
I figure it goes somewhat like this: Both the old and new owner companies are "osakeyhtiö"s (~limited company). Their ownerships differ, but not completely. Possibly some new owners in the new company, definitely some owners of the old company not in the new company. The new company acquires ~everything from the old company, by paying the old company enough for it to cover its debts (and the old company might be dissolved afterwards). Should there have been a successful negotiation result, the corresponding could have been achieved with the previous owners selling their shares to new ones, with no inter-company migrations. However, as there was not, this process was mandated by the debt restructuring.