#4 - What are the key strategic concerns of PND players for the next 3-5 years ?

We continue our review of the 10 most critical questions. Here are the concerns we think PND players will face in the near future :

As the navigation market will continue to grow, PND manufacturers will need to address both first-time buyers and replacement buyers.

We think a key strategic objective will be therefore to offer inexpensive and basic devices so that first-time buyers can access car navigation.

Now, the second key objective is to get customers to keep buying the same brand, and ideally a higher-priced product. So, PND manufacturers will have to propose attractive multi-fonctions PNDs. But they will also have to give good reasons to buy them.

This leads to the third objective, and probably the most important: increase the stickiness of their products. As we expect PNDs to be connected (see #1), we believe PND players need to invest in content and community services to create a pipeline of services based on real-time traffic information,  gas prices information, enriched points of interests, user-generated content.

As we see today with the current Tomtom/Garmin battle for TeleAtlas, content is king. And beyond maps, there is an increasing need for relevant, personalized, enriched information right in your GPS.