*Justin* schreef op 4 december 2016 13:26:
DEEL 2Taco Titulaer - TomTom NV - CFOYes, I touch on that with my previous answer a little bit. We think that the OpEx levels that we're reaching in 2016 is there or thereabout for the midterm as well.
So the increase of the high single-digit percentage is not something that we see repeating in the years after.
Harold Goddjin - TomTom NV - CEOThe OpEx was roughly EUR520 million in 2015, regarding to an increase of a high single percentage of, I don't know, 8% or 9%. Where that OpEx increase will come from, on one hand, it is telematics. Telematics is growing as a business unit; it has now more than 600 people on the payroll
also, because of the acquisition they did at the end of last year. So the run rate, of course, in that organization is going up. Not at the expense of margins; as you can see in our press release, the profitability is intact, but the baseline is going up. Then the other thing that we are doing is that we're investing more than we have in our maps organization. [..] We're getting new customers in and, yes, we think now is the right time to further improve the product that we have. I think that the pickup that we've seen from 2015 to 2016,
I don't think that it will continue to grow at that level in the years after 2016. So I'm not saying that it will go down, but especially in some areas, we can already see some operational excellence coming through.Harold Goddjin - TomTom NV - CEO[...] also there's a lot happening in the way we make maps. We have an ambition to do that in a more automated way, do it at lower cost and more scalable. We are now in a position where we can actually start to work with those new methodologies. We don't know exactly how fast that will go, but we are planning for significant productivity gains in the future.
I don't think you will see that coming through in 2016, those productivity gains, but certainly in 2017 we should be able to get the full benefits of the deployment of those new technologies.
Investor day 11//11/2016De Taeye also indicated that if Here were to have unlimited funds available, it could replicate TomTom’s processes and products within a 3 year time frame but that a chance of a failure is also a possibility. De Taeye admitted that TomTom (TeleAtlas) only got it right the 3rd time around. TomTom will continue to work on automating its map updating process and t
hat it expects the effectivity of that process to improve “not by percentages but by orders of magnitude”. That also bodes well for operational leverage going forward. [/i]