SAE Congress 2009 Interview with Dave Peters, NAVTEQ

by Jitesh Ganage, Clemson Automotive Engineering Graduate Student

I am here at the NAVTEQ booth for SAE World Congress 2009. NAVTEQ is a world leader in premium quality digital mapping data. Here at SAE World Congress 2009, they have several innovative technologies on display. One of them is a safety system that anticipates turns and provides advance road information. In my opinion this is a very exciting technology and I cannot wait until it hits the shelf. Today, I have with me Dave Peters, Customer Program Manager from NAVTEQ.

Jitesh: Good Morning Dave! First, I would like to thank you very much for volunteering for this interview. To start, can you tell me something about NAVTEQ?

Dave: Good Morning! NAVTEQ is a leading provider of digital maps for navigation location-based services, and now safety applications of vehicles, by providing precision maps to help vehicles understand where they are and what’s ahead of them.

Jitesh: So NAVTEQ is a digital mapping company. Are your products only software based or does NAVTEQ manufacture any hardware?

Dave: No, NAVTEQ’s products are all content based. Digital Maps is our main product, we also provide real time traffic information in which we capture and simulate real time traffic conditions. That came as a result of an acquisition of a company called www.traffic.com. We also just bought T-Systems in Europe which provides real time traffic information and location sensitive content in Europe. In other words we provide dynamic content, such as fuel stations with the lowest price based on where the vehicle is; air travel flight status; movie listings and other real-time content.

Jitesh: Who are your main customers?

Dave: Garmin is a very big customer because we sell lot of portable navigation content; and of course car companies. We supply all the maps and all the navigation products in the auto industry and we have customers like MapQuest that do internet- based searching for locations or point of interests. So we have a very broad spectrum of customers.

Jitesh: Do you supply to Automotive OEM’s?

Dave: Oh yeah! Almost all of them. Not as Tier 1, but as a Tier 2 supplier to whomever makes the navigation device.

Jitesh: Can you tell us a little bit about how early you start working with your customer, or how a company like NAVTEQ works with its customers?

Dave: That varies. The research department at a company like Garmin may come to us and say that they need something like this to solve a future requirement for an application. So, knowing their need, we build a reference platform to show the customer how the technology could work and help them move forward. That’s the early stage, when you are working with research and innovation groups at a company, and it moves through a path of engineers to roll itself up to the product.

Jitesh: What are your products like?

Dave: Portable navigation device information, net services, real-time content deliverables; but we manufacture no hardware. Because we provide content to many hardware suppliers we can’t compete with them.

Jitesh: As we all know an automotive industry focus is towards BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). How does NAVTEQ look at developing markets like India, China, etc?

Dave: That’s a good question. In fact were just acquired last year by Nokia. Nokia is the largest phone handset manufacturer in the world. They acquired us because they sell tremendous amount of cell phones in India and they wanted India mapped. They came to us and we were working with them and they decided to purchase us. From the car manufacturer's perspective, there is a lot of interest in India; but from cell phone manufacturer’s perspective, it is huge. So they [Nokia] influence us. Countries such as China and India are major markets for now and for the foreseeable future.

Jitesh: Once again, I would like to thank you for sparing some of your valuable time. It has been a pleasure to talk to you.

Dave: Thank You! You can also find more information at our web site www.navteq.com