Company history
Since the early 1990s, the business has seen many, many changes.
To begin with, we focused on developing business-to-business
applications for mobile devices (including bar-code reading and
meter reading) before shifting our focus to consumer software
products for PDAs. By 1998, we had established ourselves as a
market leader with a number of different applications such as our
Enroute (later RoutePlanner) and Citymaps navigation
applications.
2001 was a real milestone as we now focused our attention on car
navigation. By the end of 2002, sales of our Navigator software had
reached €8 million. By this point we concluded that there was a
real market for an affordable, easy-to-use car navigation system. A
strategic decision in 2003 resulted in us updating our core
software architecture to operate on our new hardware products as
well as across a wide variety of third-party hardware platforms and
operating systems.
Our Navcore software platform still forms the basis for our
products but it's being continuously updated. In 2004 the TomTom
Navigator for Palm was launched; and in March 2004 we launched our
first stand-alone PND: the TomTom GO. Demand has grown ever since
and we're constantly developing our products to satisfy, and
surpass, our customers' expectations. During this period our rapid
organic growth was supported by a number of acquisitions including
Tele Atlas, one of the two largest global digital mapping
companies. Tele Atlas maps cover 90 countries around the world,
over 24 million points of interest and 27 million km of roads.