Sony is to effectively withdraw from the European Sat Nav market by announcing that it will not release any new models and will discontinue existing devices in 2008, PocketLint has reported.
“Sony has a certain level of success in Europe, however we have considered various aspects such as position in industry, competitiveness of current product line-up and prospective PND business for next few years in Europe,” said the statement
“The decision was made based on the difficulty to operate this business within its current structure by taking into account the increase in development cost, accelerating price competition and especially business profitability.”
TomTom and Garmin are obviously the key players here in the UK and I know from our sister site findsatnavdeals.com that Sony don’t sell many of these and this probably wouldn’t have changed as the competitors are having to innovate at a rapid pace to keep up. I think we’ll see Garmin and Mio taking more market share from TomTom this year and but TomTom will continue to dominate with features like HD traffic – It will be interesting to see how the year pans out in the Sat Nav war…
Source: PocketLink