“We are talking with four top car manufacturers. We expect to announce our tieup with two of them in one month. We expect to close the deal very shortly,” said Amit Prasad, the founder and chief executive of Satnav Technologies.
The company has recently got Rs 30 crore venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital. Of this, the company plans a capital expenditure of Rs 10 crore for developing high quality maps among other things.
“Also, we will be spending around Rs 9 crore for marketing. We are planning to get 100 locations in the country where we can sell our products,” Prasad said.
He believes that phones will drive the Indian GPS market till 2012. Thereafter, the focus will shift to cars and dedicated navigation devices. “In the phone vertical, our focus is on smart phones segment. Mobile phone manufacturers like imate and HP bundle our software with their products, while distributors sell our product to Nokia and HTC customers separately,” he said.
“We are in talks with HTC and Nokia and expect to close deal with one of them in couple of months,” he revealed.
Satnav had about 90 per cent market share last year and expects to retain 70 per cent market share this year in the nascent yet fast growing GPS market in India.
“There were 16,000 GPS users in the country last year. We expect the number to touch two lakh this year,” Prasad said.
“Since the market size is expanding, a small fall in market share in terms of percentage will not be a point of concern. The sheer numbers are very exciting,” he said.
Prasad does not see any effect of slowdown on the company because of its small market size.
