Chicago — Navteq, which provides digital map data and real time traffic for Garmin, TomTom, Magellan and others, said it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Traffic.com, to improve Navteq’s real time traffic service.
Navteq expects to pay approximately $179 million in cash and stock for Traffic.com in a deal which should be competed in the first quarter of 2007, it said.
Traffic.com owns its own owns road sensors in 22 markets and also uses government sensors to provide traffic reports in 50 markets.
Navteq said by purchasing Traffic.com it will own its own traffic service, rather than acting as an aggregator for traffic reports from various sources. The deal will improve the profitability of Navteq’s service and its technology package, it said. Traffic.com offers not only traffic incident reports but also “flow data,” which predicts traffic flow speeds on various roadways.
Navteq said the purchase will be accretive to its earnings per share by 2009.
Traffic.com customers include more than one hundred independent radio stations and over 70 television and cable stations including Cox Radio Stations and CBS. It also supplies traffic data to AOL, Microsoft, Comcast, The Weather Channel, Garmin, XM and others.
