Commercial fleet telematics continues to be a hot vertical market in the M2M arena with a lot of M&A activities during the past two to three years, and private equity playing an increasingly pivotal role in consolidating the sector.

Vector Capital recently sold Teletrac (formerly TrafficMaster) to Danaher Corp. for an undisclosed sum. Vector acquired Teletrac in August 2010 and claims to have "transformed the business" in around three years. Danaher Corp. is already active in the commercial fleet telematics market and owns Navman Wireless. This transaction is hot on the heels of another deal in which Qualcomm sold Omnitracs to Vista Equity for $800m in cash. "It will be interesting to see Vista Equity's strategic road map for Omnitracs and how this will impact other players during the next few years," says Gareth Owen, principal analyst at ABI Research.

Another private equity group, Francisco Partners, is behind the creation of UK-based Masternaut, which is now one of the largest commercial telematics service providers in Europe. It also owns U.S.-based tracking company Nextel.

The telematics services providers themselves are also in acquisition mode. In August 2013, TomTom acquired Barcelona-based Coordina, a key player in the Spanish telematics market, which will boost its active installed base of subscribers to more than 300,000 vehicles. Even wireless carriers such as Verizon and Orange are getting involved with many having already introduced fleet management solutions.

"The commercial telematics industry has long been a very fragmented market but there are now firm signs that this is changing and we expect to see several players breaking the 500,000-subscriber unit barrier over the next few months and years," says Owen.

ABI Research's Commercial Telematics Market Data is part of its Commercial Vehicle Telematics Research Service, which provides detailed quantitative and qualitative data on developments in the commercial telematics industry around the world, including installed base, shipments, subscription and hardware revenues of commercial vehicle telematics on a global and regional basis.

Source: ABI Research