Asia-Pacific Will Overtake Europe and North America as Largest Personal Navigation Market in 2012, Says ABI Research

LONDON-- Personal navigation has been one of the great consumer technology success stories of the past four years.

“2007 was ‘the year of the personal navigation device’,” says ABI Research principal analyst Dominique Bonte. “The estimated 11 million PNDs shipped in the US last year represent a fourfold increase over 2006 shipments. Handset-based navigation also fared well, and there was a renewed interest in outdoor GPS devices. New form factors emerged. High-profile mergers and acquisitions redrew the landscape of the navigation industry.”

2008 and 2009 will see continued success for navigation devices, with ‘connected’ PNDs becoming more important. Multimedia, speech recognition and Bluetooth will all start to appear in significant numbers. Replacement markets will slow the current erosion of device prices as the PND market consolidates. Location Based Services will grow, driven by social networking movements and increasingly supported by advertising. By 2012 Europe, currently the world leader in personal navigation, as well as up-and-coming North America, will both have been eclipsed by the Asia-Pacific region in terms of market size, though regional patterns differ: A-P will favor handsets, while Europe holds fast to PNDs.

Much of the debate in consumer navigation markets revolves around whether or when offboard handsets will seize market share from PNDs. While they will certainly grow in popularity, especially in North America and Asia, ABI Research believes that they will do so only in pedestrian navigation, outdoor recreational use and LBS, while PNDs remain the form factor of choice for automotive navigation.

In an audio Webcast available on ABI Research’s website, Bonte provides a comprehensive overview of this market's performance in 2007 and the course it is taking in 2008, along with forecasts of device and system shipments through 2012. With a presentation liberally illustrated by charts and diagrams, he discusses the outlook for the future saying, “Winners and losers among consumer navigation vendors will be separated by time to market and agility, innovation, quality, community involvement, the availability of user-generated content, and effective branding.”

The “Consumer Navigation and Location-Based Services” Webcast (http://www.abiresearch.com/webcast_detail.jsp?Web=002) is now available for viewing. (Free registration on the website is required.)

The firm’s Telematics & Navigation research practice (http://www.abiresearch.com/practice/Telematics_and_Navigation) encompasses two Research Services, Commercial Telematics (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/Commercial_Telematics_ Research_Service) and Location Aware Services (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/Location_Aware_Services), which include a variety of Research Reports, Research Briefs, Market Data, an Online Database, ABI Insights, ABI Vendor Matrices, and analyst inquiry support.

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