Global PND shipments to stagnate at 48 million by 2015

LONDON, UK: Growth in PND shipments will continue to slow, stagnating at 48 million by 2015. The Asia-Pacific market will experience the strongest growth with more than 10 million shipments in 2015.

“PND shipments continue to suffer from competing navigation form factors,” says ABI Research practice director Dominique Bonte. “While the free navigation solutions from both Nokia and Google firmly establish handset-based turn-by-turn navigation as a standard feature, in-dash navigation is also becoming affordable for a larger portion of car buyers. While this leaves portable navigation positioned between a free commodity on handsets and an affordable optimized experience integrated in cars, PNDs will continue to be successful in two segments.”

Highly specified, state of the art, connected PNDs with large screens will remain attractive for high frequency, demanding navigation users because they outperform both the inherently compromised navigation experience on phones and the better integrated but quickly outdated in-dash systems, due to long automotive design cycles and a lack of upgradeability. This high end PND segment will remain dominated by Garmin and TomTom.

At the other extreme of the market, low end PNDs will attract non tech savvy users and/or higher age segments due to their superior out of the box experience and ultra low price points. In this segment there will still be an opportunity for other vendors to compete with TomTom and Garmin.