TomTom sets out plans to beat fall in PND sales
Article by: Darren Griffin
Date: 22 Jan 2014
TomTom is taking steps to halt the fall in sales of dedicated personal navigation devices which have fallen victim to the popularity of smartphones and navigation app.
Starting with an advertising campaign on radio stations and via social media networks, the Dutch navigation company is hoping to turn around the continuing fall in PND sales but it's hard to see how this can be turned around now.
Fewer customers see the benefit in buying a dedicated device when their smartphone can provide the same functionality. Most smartphones come bundled with free navigation apps and both TomTom and Garmin have smartphone apps that replicate, and in many cases, better the user experience thanks to internet connectivity for services such as Google Search and Traffic.
TomTom are investing heavily in the fitness market, one of the few areas which is enjoying year on year growth, and they continue to focus on securing deals with car manufacturers to get TomTom solutions embedded into the dashboard.
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Research and Markets: LBS Market in APAC 2014-2018: One of the Major Challenges is the Lack of Knowledge about LBS among Enterprises and Individual Consumers
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Nokia Earnings to Shed Light on Microsoft’s Future
Reuters
With Nokia’s earnings report Thursday will come more evidence of whether Microsoft'sMSFT -0.66% foray into mobile software is picking up any speed.
The Finnish former handset giant is set to release its fourth-quarter report around 11 a.m. GMT Thursday, in what most likely is Nokia’s final disclosure of the performance of its struggling handset operation before the business transfers to Microsoft. Thus, the report is likely to face scrutiny among Microsoft investors who wonder what the Redmond, Wash., company is getting into.
Despite huge investments over the past three years from both Nokia and Microsoft to jointly compete against GoogleGOOG +0.11%, Samsung and AppleAAPL +0.44% in the smartphone market, the Windows Phone smartphone platform is a distant third behind Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Together, Android and iOS held almost 95% of the market in the third quarter last year, against just 4% for Windows, according to an estimate from Gartner.
Meanwhile, Nokia has slipped out of the top six among the world’s largest makers of smartphones, after commanding nearly half of the market before Apple’s iPhone arrived in 2007.
Still, the hard-fought efforts from Nokia and Microsoft have shown early signs of bearing fruit. In the July-through-September period last year, Nokia sold 8.8 million Windows-powered Lumia devices, a number that tripled from a year earlier and set a new record for the product range.
Over the final Christmas quarter, smartphone sales tend to pick up speed, and recent data from Kantar Worldpanel showed Windows Phone gaining momentum in both Europe and developing markets. In the U.K., for instance, Windows Phone accounted for 11.4% of the smartphone market in November, while in Italy it had overtaken Apple’s iOS.
But for Microsoft, whose new Windows 8 operating system for PCs is struggling amid sluggish demand, considerably larger smartphone sales are needed. Just for the newly acquired smartphone business to break even, it will have to sell 50 million smartphones annually, the company said last year. Nokia’s current run rate for smartphone sales is likely to land between 30 million and 35 million units over 2013.
For Nokia, however, the handset business is fading into memory. The post-handset Nokia will mainly be a mobile network company, as its Nokia Solutions & Networks division will account for about 90% of revenue. Its other businesses are digital mapping and a unit managing its patent portfolio.
In Thursday’s report, the company will report the handset business as “discontinued operations.”
Dit is een heads-up, de cijfers worden rond 11 uur bekend gemaakt. Interessant over hoe HERE tegen 2014 aankijkt.
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OK mensen, weer een nieuwe dag, en de kop is eraf.
Doe mij en vele anderen een plezier, en probeer het niveau er een beetje in te houden. Laat je niet uitlokken door bepaalde personen.
Succes.
Nog even wachten tot 11 februari, en we weten hoe TomTom er écht voorstaat!