Garmin challenges TomTom with $3.3 billion bid for Tele Atlas
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 31st 2007 1:37PM
posted Oct 31st 2007 1:37PM
Man, it must feel mighty fantastic to be Tele Atlas right about now. Not even a month after TomTom finalized a whopping $2.5 billion offer to take the map maker over, Garmin -- which currently relies on NAVTEQ maps -- has come out swinging with a staggering $3.3 billion bid of its own. As expected, Tele Atlas is now taking a good hard look at both offers and examining its options, and some analysts are even suggesting that a bidding war could take the figure even higher. 'Course, such a conjecture is easy to make when TomTom has already proclaimed that it would reply in some way "in the near future." Bust out the blank checks -- this one could get ugly (or very pretty, if you're a Tele Atlas shareholder).
Now I know what Garmin does with all the money I've been giving them. Seriously, I had no idea Garmin had that kind of money laying around.
From my understanding i tele atlas maps are not nearly as good as navteq, hope garmin doesn't go out a limb for this pos
i lost a lot of money today! garmin was doing so well on the market before this stupid bid.
to me(a Garmin employee) this is a very odd move. the reasoning behind much of our success is the quality of maps we use for our products. from my opinion this was a move to secure our future and not let two companies like Nokia and tom-tom have control over the only two global map companies in existence. when you have tighter integration with your products to the maps your products can be superior. Garmin has had such a good relationship with Navteq over the years, only time will tell what this does to our products, customer base, and relationship with Navteq.
even if Nokia has Navteg and Tom has Tele, why cant garmin do business with them as usual?
To those who say that the Navteq maps are better, in Europe I've found the TeleAtlas maps to be far superior. No idea about the rest of the world, but there is a big market outside of the USA.
Yes, it is widely understood that Navteq is superior in amount of mapping detail in north america and tele-atlas is superior in mapping detail for Europe and some other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, etc.
So worldwide, I would put both countries on equal footing. Tele-atlas is better in Europe and mapping Europe with its many different languages is hard!
Wait, wait.
Is the kid ... riding the swan naked?
It's not a swan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Adventures_of_Nils
The deal, regardless the outcome, will bruise both TomTom & Garmin. The only winner is Nokia (more precisely, Navteq, now a part of Nokia).
spot on.