Meanwhile, SiRF's stock plummeted 11.5% last week when the news went public and the company had to lower its earnings forecast by $17 million. Of course, no good corporate story would complete without someone suing each other -- SiRF promptly filed a lawsuit against Global Locate, citing 4 patent infringements by Global Locate. It's not all bad news for SiRF, however, as they are bullish on the cell phone navigation market and expect to be a major player in that space.

TomTom was the fastest growing GPS manufacturer in North America for the first half of 2006, but has been losing ground to Magellan and Garmin more recently. The company enjoys market dominance in Europe (around 50%), with around 8 million units sold this year alone. However, here in the United States, Garmin is the clear market leader, with TomTom taking only around 20% of the market.

If Global Locate's receiver doesn't perform as well as SiRF's, this could be a very stupid risky move for TomTom indeed. Not surprisingly, Global Locate claims to have even better performance than SiRF, as GL's chipsets already have satellite positioning data stored on the chip, making it unnecessary to download the positioning data the way SiRF's chipsets do. This, in turn, results in faster GPS fix times. Global Locate also claims their chip uses less power than SiRF's, improving battery life on portable GPS units. SiRF's chips are currently found in over 90% of all new PNDs.

Global Locate is a privately owned, 7 year-old company whose GPS chips are targeted at the mobile phone / PDA market. The news isn't official yet, so TomTom still has no official comment, although you can read more about this here, here, and here.