PND Market Data

The GPS Business News site ( http://www.gpsbusinessnews.com/ ) refers
to this market study:

http://www.berginsight.com/ShowReport.aspx?m_m=3&Id=133

Mobile Navigation Services and Devices

http://www.berginsight.com/ReportPDF...i-mns5-sum.pdf

"At the end of 2011, there were 340 million navigation systems in use
worldwide, including an estimated 60
million factory installed and aftermarket in-dash navigation systems,
about 150 million PNDs and an estimated 130 million navigation-enabled
mobile phones. . . .

Worldwide shipments of PNDs fell to about 33 million units in 2011,
down from nearly 38 million in 2010. Berg Insight believes that PND
shipments in Europe and North America have peaked and will gradually
decline to about 7 and 6 million units per annum respectively in 2016.
New markets in other parts of the world will only partly compensate
for the decline in the mature markets. Worldwide shipments of PNDs
are forecasted to gradually decline to 23 million units in
2016. . . .

The PND market is now dominated by the three vendors Garmin, TomTom
and MiTAC that together maintain a 75 percent market share. . . .

Increasingly, navigation service providers are focusing on the
freemium business model where the core turn-by-turn navigation service
is free and users have the option to purchase additional content and
features."

Freemium? Here's one of 2.7 million Google hits on that word:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/04/com...uide-freemium/

" . . . after using the product for free, it is very hard to get the
customer to start paying for it. This phenomenon was broad enough to
get its own name: 'The penny gap'—the hardest part is to get your
customer to pay you the first penny. "