Garmin challenges TomTom with $3.3 billion bid for Tele Atlas

by Darren Murph, posted Oct 31st 2007 at 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).

Filed under: GPS

Tags: bid, garmin, maps, navigation, takeover, tele atlas, TeleAtlas, tomtom

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

JTM @ Oct 31st 2007 2:04PM

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.

Neutral

joe @ Oct 31st 2007 2:20PM

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

Neutral

darkstar @ Oct 31st 2007 2:23PM

i lost a lot of money today! garmin was doing so well on the market before this stupid bid.

Neutral

Marc D @ Oct 31st 2007 2:32PM

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.

Neutral

darkstar @ Oct 31st 2007 3:06PM

even if Nokia has Navteg and Tom has Tele, why cant garmin do business with them as usual?

Neutral

Jim @ Oct 31st 2007 3:29PM

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.

Neutral

Bobby @ Oct 31st 2007 4:20PM

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!

Neutral