TomTom aims to lead the self-driving car navigation market
TomTom aims to become the leading supplier of navigation technology for self-driving cars. The company has updated the underlying software architecture of its products in recent years and says its efforts have been rewarded by multiple contracts with car companies.
That says TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn in a conversation with Reuters. Goddijn says he thinks many automakers see the mapmaker as one of the few companies that can provide data alongside Google that is good enough to be used for assisted driving and eventually self-driving cars. It is not entirely clear with which companies TomTom is working on self-driving cars. At the end of last year it was announced that this is at least the case with Volkswagen.
Goddijn concludes the interview by stating that the main focus is now on good deals with car manufacturers, but also that TomTom’s market share is simply not big enough at the moment and that it needs to be increased. TomTom has signed contracts with Volkswagen, Kia, Hyundai and Fiat for its navigation service this year.
The market for self-driving cars must provide revenue from yet another new source in the future. The market in which TomTom grew, personal navigation, has collapsed after prices came under pressure due to cheaper competition and the arrival of mobile phones with navigation apps. After TomTom took over the digital map maker TeleAtlas in 2008 for too much money, the company continued to deteriorate. A different path was taken and TomTom significantly expanded its portfolio. Recently, the tech company came out with a GoPro competitor, the Bandit action camera. The company also licenses its digital maps, such as to Apple in 2012 when the Cupertino giant was looking for a replacement for Google Maps.
In addition, telematics is a growth market: this technology concerns the combination of telecommunications and computer science, such as making communication between cars run smoothly and extracting new information from it, which is then directly applied in an application. Despite the recent successes, there is still a dark cloud hanging over TomTom. Nokia plans to sell its cards division ‘Here’. Because Here already has a large share of the car market in the United States, about seventy percent, the outcome of the sale is important for TomTom.