After nearly 30 years of evolution, TomTom had returned to its roots and was seeing itself once again as a B2B company. In the second half of 2018, TomTom was in the process of winding down its PND business. TomTom had to diversify into telematics and ‘location technology’, where it sold and licensed its software to the automotive industry and to tech companies. The introduction of the iPhone and of Google’s free mapping and navigation services in the 2000s, however, disrupted the market. In just three years, TomTom grew to become a billion euro a year company. At the turn of the century, TomTom started to focus on digital mapping and GPS navigation, which resulted in the world’s first Portable Navigation Device (PND) for the mass market. The Dutch firm TomTom was founded in 1991 as a small software development company in the B2B market.
