Only five years ago TomTom, with a few competitors beeing hard on their heels, started turning their market upside down: With personal navigation devices (PND) a high-margin feature for luxury cars transformed into the mass-market commodity product we see today. „It took just three years before the name TomTom was elevated in Europe to the hallowed status of companies that are synonymous with their products“, says iSuppli-analyst Richard Robinson. However, TomTom’s heavy reliance on their own PND platform now represents a significant weakness for the company amid the growth slowdown and the costs and risks of producing PND hardware.
After years of double- and triple-percentage expansions, global PND shipments in 2009 are set to experience a decline of 0.7 percent compared to 2008. During the next four years global sales are expected to remain flat, settling at 41.2 million units in 2013, virtually unchanged from 2008. This is spurring companies throughout the supply chain to re-evaluate their business models. „By moving from hardware toward navigation content and software, TomTom is offloading the messy process of PND manufacturing“, says Robinson.
The upside for TomTom selling its software on Apple’s iTunes store could be significant, with the company expected to win as much as 25 percent of the high-margin smart-phone navigation market, according to market researcher iSuppli. But – even with limited growth potential and rising risks – someone does the successful job of manufacturing PNDs. It´s expected someone with a certain critical mass and therefore smaller manufacturers will either choose to exit the declining market or get pushed out of business by the leading suppliers. Once again too bad for the small and mid-size european EMS industry. Or do they have opportunities to be competitive by using actual strategies of flexible, breathing manufacturing capacities? Some say yes: Accelerating product life cycles give the so called pre-asia EMS community better chances than ever before to get high margin future products on their lines.
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