After a few days of rumors about NAVIGON withdrawal from the North American market, NAVIGON’s CEO Egon Minar spoke this morning to GPS Business News: “Due to the difficult economic environment and the aggressive pricing we have decided to withdraw from the PND business in North America for the time being. We are however not closing down our Chicago office which will continue to serve our automotive and mobile phone businesses in North America.”
Egon Minar did not detail how many people are affected by this downsize, but it is a “significant number of people in our Chicago office”, he said. Only a few people will remain to take care of the existing PND customers: “we will continue to fulfill all obligations to our existing PND customers in terms of map update, etc.”, he added.
NAVIGON launched its first products on the North American market in September 2007. During the first quarter of 2008 the German company reached the fourth position on the US market with a share of 7.7%. To reach this share so quickly NAVIGON invested in advertising and was the first to introduce a lifetime traffic service bundled into the price of its product. The German company also had a local product team to localize its software to North American tastes
Via: GPS Business News
Thanks to Dave L for the tip!
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