Hot News! Garmin announce a counter bid for Tele Atlas

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“Today Garmin announced a counter bid for the mapping company Tele Atlas. The offer to buy a minimum 66.67% of the shares of the company at 24.50 Euros this values Tele Atlas at 2.3 Billion Euros.

Is this the start of a bidding war for the two mapping companies? There have been rumors in the industry about Microsoft buying both TomTom and Tele Atlas. Nokia has made an offer for Navteq, will we see a counter bid there as well? Is this really a good move for the industry? Time will tell, but it will certainly make the run up to the festive season very interesting.”

Source:
http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=60893

 

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Garmin topped TomTom's initial offer last week, but now the Financial Times reports that the Dutch firm has fought back. TomTom has now raised its bid to €30/share, up from €21.25 and beating Garmin's €24.50. At the same time, it has built up a 28 per cent stake in the firm. The new offer values Tele Atlas at €2.9bn.

"We are now well positioned to buy Tele Atlas," TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn told the FT. "We are now their biggest customer and their biggest shareholder."

Garmin and TomTom both want Tele Atlas badly, as it is the only major, global commercial map-data provider they can buy. Navteq was recently taken over by Nokia for $8.1bn.
Whichever of the two sat nav makers loses the bidding war will need to buy in mapping for its products from a rival hardware provider, which is unlikely to be much fun. (my bold)

Sauce...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/07/garmin_tomtom_teleatlas_bid_2/

My thoughts: Winner takes all… and that's not good for us