inspirator schreef op 28 januari 2014 08:24:
Apple (AAPL) needs to, or at least should, acquire TomTom to secure its position in mapping and location technology.
Without A Buyer, TomTom's Route Is Unclear
Jan. 26, 2014 11:28 PM ET| About: TMOAY, Includes: NOK
Disclosure: I am long LNVGY, . (More...)
When the best exit strategy for a stock is a buyout from a company that may not actually need the products or technology involved, it's tough for me to get all that excited. Be that as it may, the potential of a buyout has been the strongest bull argument for TomTom (OTCPK:TMOAY) (TOM2.AS) for over a year, as many have argued that Apple (AAPL) needs to, or at least should, acquire TomTom to secure its position in mapping and location technology.
There's little argument that mapping/location/navigation technology is important for smartphone manufacturers, and increasingly for automobile manufacturers as well. Whether its important enough for another company to shell out the more than the $1.6 billion it would likely take to acquire TomTom is debatable. The rise of "social mapping" is creating more technology options and the sale of Nokia's (NOK) handset business to Microsoft makes Nokia a more viable licensing partner. I'm not going to rule out the possibility of a company buying TomTom for its map assets, but the stock appears about 20% overvalued on its own independent merits and that makes this more of a binary story than I prefer.
A Necessary Asset … With Three Providers
Maps and GPS-based location/navigation functionality has become a virtual must-have for smartphone manufactures. That leads them to one of three providers - TomTom, Nokia, or Google (GOOG). As OEMs have in the past proven reluctant to deal too extensively with their competition, TomTom has been a beneficiary as companies like Google, Sony, and Samsung have licensed their mapping technology.
Those relationships have been changing. Google has built and bought its own mapping technology, and its licensing payments to TomTom have been declining for a few years. At the same time, Nokia's exit from the handset business may make it a more suitable partner for other handset OEMs, and Samsung chose Nokia instead of TomTom as the map provider for its new Tizen OS.
seekingalpha.com/article/1968591-with...