Magellan, American manufacturer of navigational equipment has announced that it is selling its consumer electronics division to competitor MiTAC. In this division, the RoadMate and Maestro SatNavs got developed, and also the Triton outdoor devices.Large player
Magellan is a large player on the US market. Up to a couple of years ago, the company was market leader, even until Garmin and TomTom also took their bit of the cake. Since then, Magellan has always remained to be the number three on the US SatNav market. The growth in number of sold devices was seriously lacking compared to the market development, and this made Magellan’s market share seriously shrink. They also had no chance of making an imprint on the European SatNav market because TomTom, Garmin, Mio and Navigon had just about the entire market covered.The Magellan customers felt the results: service and support became less and less and Magellan brought little or no novelties to their product line. In the Autumn, a large part of Magellan’s management took a run for their money and left. CEO Nelson Chan, Vice President of product marketing Christian Bubenheim and Clay Babcock, senior Director of product planning all left the company. The reserved spot at the IFA fair in Berlin was cancelled at the very last moment this year.
Holding
MiTAC is the mother company to other SatNav brands: Mio and Navman. Navman was added to this large Asian holding at the beginning of last year, for a price of only 16 million dollars. The two brands still co-exist, and slowly but steadily we see the best of both worlds becoming united into one device. In most Countries, only one of the two brands is sold.No announcements about financial details of the takeover have been made yet, but considering the current situation at Magellan the amount will probably be relatively low here. It’s expected the whole takeover will be completed by the end of January 2009.
Sentiments
Of course MiTAC is now aiming for the market share of Magellan SatNavs, which is currently a bit less than 10%. Unfortunately, the brand also drags a bunch of negative sentiments with it, so the question remains if MiTAC will be able to change all that through their Mio brand name. Mio is currently the number four on the US market and has about 6% market share. So in any case, with the Magellan takeover, MiTAC is strengthening its position substantially.For the European market, this whole takeover has little or no consequences. As said, Magellan has little or no market share on this continent. The Mio and Navman brands hold a reasonably solid position on the European continental and UK markets though.
