#8- Why did Nokia buy Navteq

We have already talked about Nokia buying Navteq for $8.1 billion, a spotlight on the navigation industry that was quickly followed by a bidding war for Tele Atlas, Navteq's only global rival in mapmaking.

For a GPS maker, it's important to be in a good relationship with its map provider and better to have it in-house :) But this is also important for a cell phone maker if location-based services are one of the cornerstones of its strategy.

Nokia already showed in 2006 its objective to become an integrated player in the navigation market by acquiring  Gate5, a European navigation software supplier. With the recent acquisition of Navteq, we understand that Nokia wants to move from a phone-making model to a service-making model by offering consumers maps, routing, navigation and other location-based applications on its mobile devices.

As recently announced here :  Nokia would target pedestrians, leave the car-navigation market to others, and work on maps improvements with the help of communities : think about hundreds of millions of Nokia phone users worldwide keeping the maps up-to-date. It's a big media-capture device which means people can capture content, put it on the map and share it with others. 

We already discussed it here,  Berg Insight  expects a high growth on the US and European markets for maps and navigation in handsets. Mobile subscribers accessing maps and downloading routes using their mobile handsets in Europe and the USA are expected to grow from 4 million users in 2007 to 43 million users in 2012 !

Clearly, Nokia which was looking for new sources of revenues as the cell phone industry matures is on its way to focus on handset-based mapping, turn-by-turn navigation services and connected devices with Gate5 and Navteq. 

Comments

[Jérôme]

Le site des services Nokia est ouvert, www.ovi.com, du "social mobile networking". C'est sûr c'est mieux qu' UBIK ;-) Mais c'est pas encore ça d'un point de vue expérience utilisateur. Là pour le coup UBIK c'est mieux :-D