I like the questions at the end of a company since a large market I work in (insurance / life insurance) is dwindling as well. What does that do with companies? How do they communicate? What happens when the inevitable shrinking sets in and your brain drain is faster than the way you shrink? Should you ever actively terminate a company and tranfer IP / assets?
Late 1990s/early 2000s acquisitions just always sound so wild to me! Insanely wasteful, or just even bizarre. Tons of old/traditional corporations trying to merge/buy their way into completely unrelated markets, oe in this case cash rich new megacorps like AOL that had immense potential just squandering insane amounts of capital with almost 0 RoI. Crazy times!
Out of curiosity, why is the life insurance market dwindling??
As long as the company provides value to shareholders and customers, why wind it down? Not everything had to be about growth, growth, growth.
TomTom obviously offers no value to shareholders (no dividend policy, history of losses, perhaps except those searching for volatily). It's 49% owned by the directors with a 51% float. It clearly offers some value to customers since it has revenues. However, the revenues have been falling for a decade and most auto manufacturers seem able to procure these materials in-house.
It has value to 4500 employees who retain gainful employment at TomTom! But the financial metric to measure value added for those employees is lacking: TomTom is worth nearly nothing. Society would be better of 'cancelling' TomTom and letting all employees go to companies with higher added value to society. They could be teachers, nurses and researchers at companies that further the technical boundary. Instead, they are working for no value at all except their salaries. It's sad. (: Hyperbole.)
Most auto manufacturers go outside for nav/infotainment units from suppliers like Here, MVI, Telenav, etc.
I don’t see any impenetrable barrier that TomTom couldn’t try to compete in that market (or as a data supplier to that market).
Because they are selling raw map data to Google, Bing and Apple (maybe?).
