TomTom’s latest quarterly results (link to: tomtom.com) do not make for any kind of cheerful reading for the Consumer Division.
Q3.17 vs Q3.16 show revenues down by 29% from Eu137m to Eu97 with a comparable YTD decline of 22%.
Ominously the report quotes “Strategic review of Consumer Sports in progress“.
This information would clearly have been known and forecast internally quite some time ago and backs up the rationale for recent redundancies.
Who should buy TomTom in your opinion? And what should they do with it?
FYI: Consumer=location based products in drive/sports categories
- Running, hiking+golf watch – basically the same hardware (good)
- Bandit Action Cam (a bit old)
- Fat sensor wrist band (hmmm)
- Online platform and app (nice)
- A reduced number of people with product/market-realted skills (done some good work previosuly)
The brand is very strong and the rest of TomTom wouldn’t want to sell it off I’d imagine. So that leaves the tech/people that would need re-branding/re-purposing. Polar? Lezyne? VC?
They should sell to Nike who could finally get their own “professional” sport watches and dump those Apple gymmicks whom they wont sell to any “serious” athlete out there. After all if i am not mistaken those early Nike (TomTom) watches were quite decent…
hadn’t thought of that one. not sure nike or any of the other garment manufacturers would make such a ply…but they might
There’s no appetite with the other garment manufs today for getting back into wearables. All of them are still working to fully get out of the wearables business, which was largely seen as a distracting disaster for them. Instead, they want to partner. Apple did so with Nike, Adidas with Fitbit, and so on.
It’s over already. Things set in motion last week and key employees already being let go, the remainder of the division given a timeline. Really too bad, they nailed the low-end of the market so well.
yep I know some people in the UK too.
post was really about speculating what will happen. there must be some value in the people or tech
Yeah, it’s tricky. The longer an acquisition takes to occur (and I don’t think it’ll occur), the more people jump ship. The ‘best people’ (long term leads, etc…) will quickly be offered positions elsewhere and snatched up. Once you lose those people, the appeal of an acquisition diminishes quickly.
I’m honestly not sure who would acquire them at this point. I could see someone like Suunto doing it if they had the cash, since they really struggle with dev/etc resources (and Amer does like buying things). But it’d be a heck of an integration job to merge those two product lines. Almost better for Suunto (or Polar) to take the Fitbit approach and just acquihire for people and some backend SDK-style stuff. Which of course, takes us back to item #1: Not wasting time.
Given the dates TomTom is tossing around internally, most of the top people will want to be gone by mid-November or so, to secure positions ahead of the New Year.
When a brand does not fit, it dies. Today, in sports watches, having some design but with weak software support end up succumbing. I fear that others will know the same path. Probably Garmin (very strong), maybe Suunto and Apple will dominate, and some brand cheap chinese brands like amazfit.