The $4.3 billion acquisition of the digital maps company TeleAtlas by GPS manufacturer TomTom is final, "after what was beginning to seem like an eternity," according to Technoride.
The deal began brewing in summer 2007, and has not been without a few stumbling blocks. According to the AP, "TomTom has fought for nearly a year to land TeleAtlas. It had a bidding contest with its U.S. rival Garmin Ltd., intense regulatory scrutiny from the European Union and its own problems internally as the selling price of its products fell sharply."
Garmin is the leading manufacturer of portable GPS in the U.S., but TomTom is beating them in sales in other countries. Check out more on the preferred TomTom and Garmin models in our nav buying guide.
As major GPS distributors, the two companies have been frequent sparring partners. "Garmin has acquired distributors in Germany, Denmark, Italy, and Spain and has boosted marketing efforts, including buying advertising time during the Super Bowl," BusinessWeek states. "The two also have knocked heads over patents in the U.S. and European courts."
With TomTom now declared victor there could be large ripples in the portable navigation industry. TeleAtlas and another digital map company, Navteq, have been the main portable map distributors to the leading GPS companies, but Navteq is in the middle of a merger with Nokia. BusinessWeek says, "Now that Navteq has gone to Nokia, whichever company loses TeleAtlas will rely on a rival for its mapping data."
In addition, GPSLodge reports, "TomTom will need to make some concessions to reduce the concern about the deal negatively affecting the market. … It appears that the market is going to need assurances about access to data from the two new owners of the world's mapping data."
