TomTom 2008 Annual Report Download - page 7

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THE ACQUISITION OF TELE ATLAS: With more and more people getting acquainted with
navigation, customers give ever increasing importance to intelligent routing and up-to-date
maps. TomTom has always been a leader in the innovation of routing technologies and with
the acquisition of Tele Atlas in June 2008, we are also able to lead the industry in meeting
changing customer expectations on the map front.
Validating maps, detecting changes in the road network and providing current data in the
form of updates is critically important. By bundling TomTom’s technologies like Map Share™
and IQ Routes™ with Tele Atlas’ competencies we are able to significantly improve the time
to market of map changes and increase the quality of the Tele Atlas map. At the same time
this allows Tele Atlas to improve all aspects of the digital map maintenance, enrichment and
creation processes.
OUR MISSION: It is our mission to improve
people’s lives by using the Group’s combined
knowledge and expertise in the field of routing,
digital mapping, and guidance services. We tailor
our activities towards multiple audiences and aim
to play a leading role on all platforms where our
products and services can be of use.
OUR STRATEGY: We have democratised
navigation by making it affordable, accessible and
easy to use. To address a broader range of
customers and to further differentiate ourselves
from competition we continuously improve our
products and services in terms of accuracy,
relevance and completeness. To achieve this we
have focused our activities and centralised our
R&D resources, creating scale economies that are
of vital importance for us to continue to lead the
industry in terms of innovation. In the past years
we have introduced unique innovative solutions
like our real-time traffic information service, HD
Traffic, our dynamic routing technology, IQ Routes™
and Speed Profiles™ and our map improvement
solution, Map Share. These are all unique TomTom
solutions showing how our strategy is setting us
apart from the competition.
We have positioned ourselves in a unique place in
the value chain of the navigation industry as we
own and focus on the parts where the most value
is added: digital mapping, routing technology, and
dynamic content and services. We are device
agnostic and we aim to deliver products and
services for all types of device, tailored to the
needs of the different customer groups. For the
foreseeable future PNDs and in-dash navigation
solutions will form the core of our in-car
navigation offering. People prefer fit for purpose
devices that are developed and designed to do
one specific thing very well. We also service the
mobile handset industry using the existing
knowledge and customer relationships within
the Group.
The time to market of content is of great
importance; the faster that real world changes
to traffic and roads are shared with our
customers the more relevant that content is.
To keep pace with these changes we use the
feedback that we get from the millions of people
in communities like those from TomTom and
Vodafone. Connected devices will further speed
up the information sharing process by enabling
us to launch real-time services. As the
importance of our products and services
increases they will become an essential part of
more and more people’s daily lives. In turn this
will further increase the amount of community
feedback we receive which will feed into the
quality of our maps and services.