![]() The market exploded Vigreux and the team, now 40-strong, saw the business grow from revenues of €42m to €1.8bn in four years. The emergence of Google Maps was one of the key reasons for TomTom’s revenues and profits plunging after 2007. “And the first touchscreen,” Vigreux says proudly. The first, the TomTom GO, cost £499 and was released in March 2004. Rather than having to rely on people who already owned expensive PDAs, they realised they could sell them dedicated objects for less. But a Bill Clinton-enacted change made it open, and Vigreux and the team at TomTom saw an opportunity. Before May 2000, civilian GPS systems were accurate to within only 100 metres only the military could get its “full” accuracy of a few metres. The company then saw an opportunity to make mapping devices for consumers. “It was very difficult to put everything into one product we had a city product, but we were already very good at compressing data so we could fit it in.” Smartphones were not yet in use.Īt first, it wrote mapping applications for the handhelds, squeezing data into tiny (by today’s standards) amounts of storage. Initially, it made business-facing products for meter reading and barcodes for the popular handhelds – Palm Pilot, Compaq iPaq and Psion Series 5. After four years at Psion – “it was one of the most interesting tech startups around we learned a lot, there was a bunch of smart people” – she moved to Holland to join a software distributor for the Psion and other handhelds, and then helped set up TomTom in 1991. But the rise of mobile phones pushed it to a software-only path: its Symbian software became the basis of the first successful range of smartphones, from Nokia. Psion was a stalwart of British technology, producing a much loved handheld computer series that rivalled the Palm, from the US, in the 1990s. “North Africa, Israel, Europe,” she said, having joined Psion from business school in 1987. She travelled widely, which was her original aim in getting into business. Her first managerial role was running exports at Psion, the iconic and hugely influential British technology company, in the 1990s. ![]() Shares hit an all-time low of €2.84.įor Vigreux, however, reinvention and building from the ground up is what she is used to. At the start of 2009, the company wrote off more than €1bn on the Tele Atlas purchase. Its shares plunged from their high of €64.80. US-based Garmin tried to snatch Tele Atlas, but a brief bidding war saw TomTom prevail with a €2.9bn bid the deal closed in June 2008.īut the stock market did not like TomTom’s purchase, which was funded by debt and a new share issue. In October 2007, Nokia bid €5.7bn for Navteq, the other independent. In July 2007, it made a €2bn offer for Tele Atlas, the company’s map data supplier, which was one of only two independent mapping companies (and also supplied Google). TomTom had already decided that the future lay in providing map data and telematics for vehicle makers. Every company starts with a blank sheet of paper, and some of them then arrive like a tsunami.”įor TomTom, survival would quickly become a matter of adapting to the new reality, in which Google could undermine the paid-for satnav business – which was then selling millions of units each quarter – with software that would quickly be in everyone’s hands. ![]() Hilton Hotels would never have expected their margins would be eaten away by Airbnb. But Vigreux, 50, has seen enough change in the technology business to know that “your competitors come from different fields – they’re not the ones you expect them to be. The arrival of a search engine company in the field of in-car navigation is not the sort of threat you would normally plan for.
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