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More Consolidation: NAVICO and C-MAP Merge

Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:26 pm
by jimh
An announcement from NAVICO today says:

Egersund, Norway. Navico, the world’s largest manufacturer of marine electronics, and C-MAP, a leading supplier of digital navigation products to the recreational and commercial marine market, announced today that they have merged. Effective immediately, C-MAP will become another powerful brand in the Navico portfolio, alongside Lowrance®, Simrad® and B&G®. The merger will accelerate the companies’ shared ambition to create the world’s biggest digital marine ecosystem and deliver the best experiences for customers around the world.

“This merger is an incredible opportunity to drive innovation in the marine industry and lead a new digital era,” said Leif Ottosson, CEO, Navico Group. “We see huge potential to bring our two teams together and accelerate growth.”

“We’re incredibly excited to join forces with Navico,” said Sean Fernback, former CEO of C-MAP and now Navico Group CTO and corporate executive member. “We now have an opportunity to create a seamless experience by developing an ecosystem that combines the best hardware, software, services and applications.”

For more information on the Lowrance, Simrad, Simrad Commercial, B&G and C-MAP brands, please visit http://www.lowrance.com, http://www.simrad-yachting.com, http://www.navico-commercial.com, http://www.bandg.com and http://www.c-map.com.

Re: More Consolidation: NAVICO and C-MAP Merge

Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:58 pm
by jimh
The “ecosystem” of electronic chart plotter brands and electronic chart cartography publishers is, indeed, complicated, and keeping track of alliances, compatibilities, and chart version or tiers is so complicated that I can’t manage it without making it a very serious and time-consuming study--which I have not done. For me, personally, the water I boat on is not changing very much--mostly very old rock that is not moving or altering--so I don't have a constant need to get the latest version or edition of a chart. Charts from the 1850's are mostly good enough. :-)

I do see that C-Map seems to have had an alliance with Raymarine. Raymarine chart plotters and sounders are direct competition for NAVICO.

The press release say C-Map is “merged” with NAVICO—does that mean “owned” by NAVICO? Unless C-MAP is a lot bigger than I thought, I would think that NAVICO is the dominant entity.

Re: More Consolidation: NAVICO and C-MAP Merge

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:01 pm
by jimh
A corollary to the NAVICO--C-MAP merger, GARMIN recently (October 2017) bought NAVIONICS, another electronic chart publisher. We see there are signs of electronic chart publishing becoming more parochial. NAVIONICS and C-MAP are probably the two largest publishers of electronic charts, and now they are tied to specific brands of chart plotter by ownership arrangements.

NAVIONICS chart appear to still be published in formats that are compatible with many chart plotters. For a listing, see

exturl]https://dbe2w38xsulyl.cloudfront.net/wysiwyg/docs/Compatibility_Guides/Americas_CompatibilityGuide.pdf[/exturl]

Several years ago the HUMMINBIRD company bought chart publisher LAKEMASTER, and withdrew all the lake master charts from competitor's products. They also bought the popular SONAR app, DRDEPTH, and took it off the open market, incorporating some of its technology into their own brands.

Re: More Consolidation: NAVICO and C-MAP Merge

Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2018 4:57 pm
by endus
I was recently looking at chartplotters and reading up (again, still have not replaced my plotter despite saying I need to since I bought the boat) and the drama with Garmin and Navionics is interesting. First Navionics started making Garmin-compatible charts, then Garmin updated their firmware to lock the Navionics charts out. Now Garmin owns Navionics so, presumably, the Navionics charts will eventually work on Garmin plotters, but I wonder what the future of support for other brands of plotters is? It seems like a relatively bad time to purchase a new plotter until these questions are settled!

Re: More Consolidation: NAVICO and C-MAP Merge

Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 8:37 am
by Hoosier
I still use the Lakemaster Michigan chart SD in my, now ancient, Lowrance XOG portable GPS/chartplotters. They were fabulous map cards because they not only showed water features in great detail but they also had all land roads, even two-track ORV trails.