Microsoft Corp has offered roughly $130m for Sendit AB, a Swedish developer of mobile internet application server platforms for GSM mobile phone networks. The board of Stockholm-based Sendit has recommended that its shareholders accept the $39-per-share offer.

Sendit should fit neatly with Microsoft’s plan for Windows everywhere by opening the emerging mobile internet market to the Windows environment. As Sanjay Jhawar, Sendit’s vice president in charge of marketing and business development, explained, the proposed acquisition would complete its offering in the mobile internet space.

Sendit’s main product is its Internet Cellular Smart Access (ICSA), an NT-based server which it has successfully marketed to GSM network operators. Its client list includes French incumbent France Telecom and competitor Bouygues Telecom, Norwegian incumbent Telenor and new carrier Europolitan in Sweden, as well as Singapore Telecom and Hong Kong Telecom in Asia (04/16/99).

Jhawar said that ICSA currently provides mobile email services or, as the company prefers to call it, mobile-optimized email. Thus GSM operators can use it to offer access to emails for customers with simple handsets, ones with SIM Applications Toolkit, CE-based portable devices, PCs or web terminals. The devices offer different levels of service. These vary from the basic handset receiving advisory notes to let the customer know he has mail without his being able to read it, through to the actual retrieval, via a GSM data link, and display of the information on the CE-based PDA, Jhawar explained.

Sendit is a public company, quoted on Stockholm’s secondary exchange, known as the SBI list and, as such, it requires the acceptance of shareholders representing 90% of its capital for the Microsoft bid to go through. That said, the founders and management, who hold 43% of the stock, have already signaled their acceptance. A prospectus for the bid will be issued in early June, with the expectation, assuming acceptance by the shareholders, that the deal is completed by early July.

Last month, Sendit reported a first quarter net loss of SKr0.84m ($101,000) on revenue that grew 272% to SKr29.3m ($3.5m).