ABI: Personal Navigation Devices to Surpass 100 Million Units by 2011
December 11, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
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The consumer navigation market saw unprecedented levels of activity and growth in 2007, mainly driven by personal navigation devices (PNDs), which offer a compelling mix of ease of use, features, portability and affordability.
According to ABI Research, PND markets will continue to grow strongly to reach a global sales volume of more than 100 million units by 2011.
Analysts said dedicated PNDs will remain the preferred form factor for use in the car, but will be complemented by handset-based systems for pedestrian navigation and new use cases, such as outdoors.
New form factors, including portable media players, ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs), Internet tablets and mobile Internet devices will also appear.
"Handset-based navigation will be stimulated by convergence trends and technological advances in low cost GPS-receiver integration and improved indoor coverage," said ABI Research principal analyst Dominique Bonte.
"Driven by the involvement of cellular carriers, off-board handset-based navigation will grow strongly in North America, reaching a sales volume of 21 million units by 2012. It will be a catalyst for the uptake of location-based services such as search, friend finder and tracking features."
Analysts said Europe is the leading navigation market, but strong growth is expected in developing countries such as China and India. By 2012, more navigation systems will ship in Asia-Pacific than in any other region.
The high levels of competition and price pressure will result in continued consolidation and vertical integration, analysts said, as evidenced by the acquisition of the two main digital map providers - Navteq and Tele Atlas.
An important driver for consolidation is the need to aggregate user communities under strong brands to take advantage of the potential of user-generated map and point of interest (POI) content.
Analysts said navigation vendors are looking to differentiate their offers by adding speech technology, multimedia features and 3-D map content, and by targeting specific segments.
Connected navigation will become standard on handsets, PNDs and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) systems as the availability of real-time traffic information and up-to-date map content becomes a key requirement, analysts said. New opportunities for the use of traffic probe data will also emerge.
Source: ABI Research.