Garmin wants to acquire Tele Atlas
Garmin, in an apparent bid to further solidify their role as king of the GPS hill, is making a bid for Tele Atlas. Tele Atlas is a digital map maker based in Amsterdam, and would be an amazing asset for Garmin’s hardware-based operation. The in-house combination of Garmin hardware and Tele Atlas software would be pretty hard to step to. The crazy part, however, is that Garmin has offered a bid of $3.3 billion. Yeah, Billion. Crazier still is that this offer came completely out of the blue. Neither company had expressed any interest in one another prior to the bid, and there have been no talks or negotiations. Nothing like waking up one morning to see that someone is offering you $3.3 billion, right? Tele Atlas has yet to respond to the offer, stating only that they are currently "reviewing their options." Anyone think they’ll pass on this incredible sum? Yeah, we didn’t think so.
Tele Atlas sucks compared to Navteq, which Nokia is buying / bought.
Garmin hardware is great, but coupling that with Tele Atlas without Navteq onboard will, in MY opinion, result in less desirable products.
How can I make these comments? Well because on my Garmin with Navteq maps I can navigate to the newer developments in the area (houses, communities). With the TomTom with Tele Atlas “updated” maps there aren’t any new developments, etc.
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Josh, please do a bit more research.
1) The offer did not come out of the blue. The offer was most likely in response to TomTom’s $2.5b takeover offer.
2) Tele Atlas will quite likely reject the offer, as TomTom is about to counter-offer (which theoretically will be better than Garmin’s offer).
3) The fact that there were no talks between Garmin and Tele Atlas suggests something; Since TomTom has been in buyout negotiations with Tele Atlas for over a month now, this “out-of-the-blue” offer could merely be to drive TomTom’s offer up. It is evident that TomTom really wants Tele Atlas, so Garmin is making sure they pay the price for it…
I agree with Ryan. Moreover, Tele Atlas’ management already declared a preference for a take-over by Tom Tom. Though, it’s up to the share-holders to decide…
Tele altlas more like teleusless they take at least a year to update their maps I know this because we did carpet/tile/crout cleaning 2 years ago in queen creek we ther was a house ther was a blank spot on the map always an ther so inacaurate as well even curent addresses in foubtain hills were way off.
Agreed that teleatlas may prefer to merge with TomTom, but Garmin has a substantially better financial structure. I think the key questions is at what point is it cheaper to 1) force agreements that you continue to sell the map database to your competitor and 2) what is the cost of building up a new database — certainly less than the $8 billion that is being spent on Navteq.
Horribly uninformed posting, BTW.
Garmin has much deeper pockets so they could out bid TomTom if they want/need to. The CEO of Garmin spoke yesterday on fast money and said they think this is a great opportunity for them. However their stock drop around $10 that day.
Nino
this move will not benefit garmin much but will hurt tom tom in a big way just because nav tech and telenav are the two options when it comes to maps so with nokia taking over the other this is crunch time. good for telenav folks though this is going to a bidding war
Interesting idea that GRMN might have bid for TeleAtlas just to make TomTom pay more. This is going to be interesting to watch play out. I think if GRMN is truly interested in acquiring TeleAtlas (even though you say it sucks), maybe they figure they can buy it and rejuvenate the company, closing the gap between TeleAtlas and Navteq.