![]() At the start of 2009, the company wrote off more than €1bn on the Tele Atlas purchase. Its shares plunged from their high of €64.80. US-based Garmin tried to snatch Tele Atlas, but a brief bidding war saw TomTom prevail with a €2.9bn bid the deal closed in June 2008.īut the stock market did not like TomTom’s purchase, which was funded by debt and a new share issue. In October 2007, Nokia bid €5.7bn for Navteq, the other independent. In July 2007, it made a €2bn offer for Tele Atlas, the company’s map data supplier, which was one of only two independent mapping companies (and also supplied Google). TomTom had already decided that the future lay in providing map data and telematics for vehicle makers. Every company starts with a blank sheet of paper, and some of them then arrive like a tsunami.”įor TomTom, survival would quickly become a matter of adapting to the new reality, in which Google could undermine the paid-for satnav business – which was then selling millions of units each quarter – with software that would quickly be in everyone’s hands. Hilton Hotels would never have expected their margins would be eaten away by Airbnb. But Vigreux, 50, has seen enough change in the technology business to know that “your competitors come from different fields – they’re not the ones you expect them to be.
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