Tele Atlas: Ebit-Verlust im Halbjahr - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

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Tele Atlas, Anbieter von digitalen Landkarten, hat im ersten Halbjahr 2001 trotz Umsatzsteigerung den Verlust vor Steuern und Zinsen (Ebit) nicht verringern können. So sind die Umsatzerlöse nach Angaben des Unternehmens im ersten Halbjahr um 34 Prozent auf 36,5 Mio. Euro angestiegen.

Die Navigationsprodukte für Kraftfahrzeuge sind nach Angaben des Unternehmens der Grund für die gestiegenen Umsatzerlöse in Europa. Dieser Bereich habe im ersten Halbjahr 2001 mit 24,7 Mio. Euro zum europäischen Umsatz beigetragen. Die Umsätze von Tele Atlas North America seien im ersten Halbjahr 2001 im Vergleich zum ersten Halbjahr des Vorjahres konstant geblieben.

Weiteren Angaben zufolge weist Tele Atlas im ersten Halbjahr 2001 ein Ergebnis vor Zinsen und Steuern (Ebit) von minus 10,4 Mio. Euro auf. Im vergleichbaren Vorjahreszeitraum betrug das Ebit noch minus 1,5 Mio. Euro. Der Verlust sei vor allem auf den Erwerb des US-Unternehmens Etak zurückzuführen. Das europäische Geschäft von Tele Atlas sei mit 1,0 Mio. Euro im zweiten Quartal 2000 positiv gewesen.

Der Nettoverlust belaufe sich in den ersten sechs Monaten des Jahres 2001 auf 7,3 Mio. Euro gegenüber einem Verlust von 1,4 Mio. Euro im Vergleichszeitraum 2000.

Autor: Sebastian Feuß (© wallstreet:online AG),09:44 02.08.2001

[Lassemann]

Interessanter Artikel in globalbilling.org:

Location Based Services



Inside Billing - Volume 3 Issue 7
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I thought long and hard about writing another article on Location Based Services a month after the last one. I was persuaded by my good friend the editor that it was okay to change my mind, and that, after all, I was only human (and although she paused in a slightly mysterious way when she said this, I believe that she meant it).

The reason that I wanted to write about Location Based Services again is because I have indeed changed my mind about them, and am more enthusiastic about the potential - particularly the immediate potential - than I was only a month ago.

The reason I have changed my mind is that the recent workshop in Prague - thank you, Oskar Mobil - highlighted some examples of services that make far more sense to me than being bombarded with advertising on my mobile as I walk down a street.

The examples come from an unexpected place, Estonia, and were explained by the representative of a slightly unexpected company, EHPT. Essentially what Estonia Mobile Telecom has done is initiate some location based services, based on SMS. `Find my Buddy` is one service, mainly used on Friday nights, when friends are trying to work out which bar other friends are drinking in. `Nearest Gas Station` is another. You are driving, you need gas; an SMS can tell you how far - and where - the next station is. And here is the clever bit - it will select a gas station that has a restaurant, because it knows that that is your preference.

These services came about in Estonia because the police and emergency services - as elsewhere - need to know where emergencies happen in order to respond. Estonia Mobile Telecom decided to see whether they could launch services that turned the necessity into a profitable business. The result was a system that allows customers to enter profiles (via the Web, and later perhaps via the mobile itself, or IVR) that interfaces with a content management system and a location system. The location system itself uses GSM triangulation, enhanced by software as a result of customers wanting the service to be more accurate. No GPS system is used.

The mixture of these systems allows Estonia Mobile Telecom to receive a request from a customer, interrogate the content provider database (for the nearest gas station), ask the location database the distances to the nearest stations, and finally ask the customer profile database if there are any parameters that the system should be aware of, `must have a restaurant`, for example.

The result of this is that they have come up with content based services that are priced and billed based on a perceived value (in this case to the content providers themselves), and which are made valuable by the technology that enables the location information to add the value.

This is another example of solutions being created, value being created and extra revenue being created by countries with low Internet penetration, and who focus on the technology at hand (see various diatribes on i-mode). They are actually doing what Western Europe and North America are waiting to be able to do with 3G. As the bandwidth increases, as it will, the services that were launched on SMS (9.6 bps) will become richer (view menu, download map and so on).

Services that are perceived to be too heavy on bandwidth (Internet access) will still be waiting to be launched when 3G arrives.

Which poses another question: how will we know when we have got to 3G? If 3G is only about attaining a certain speed to enable certain services, we may never realise we have arrived.

For more information conact Janet Nunn
Public Relations Officer
Global Billing Association
Tel: [phone]