Messy maybe, but this is how marine electronics get made, and Garmin HQ in Olathe, Kansas, is all about making stuff. The engineer who leads the hardware side of the marine department told me how his office at a previous job was two floors away from the work benches where he and his colleagues could get down and dirty with their projects. By contrast, this is just one of a dozen well-lived-in work stations on the same floor housing both marine hardware and software engineers. And that particular lead engineer has been at Garmin for 17 years, his software counterpart 16. This is a company that engineers built, and, wow, is it cooking...
Please don't jump to conclusions about this first real slice of the finished Panbo/MTA survey until you better understand what it represents. The questions quoted at the top of the table above were "open ended". The 950 people who spent time taking the survey (thank you all!) got no check box type guidance toward their answers. In fact, no brand names were specifically mentioned anywhere in the survey. So the 1,558 positive responses, along with the 773 negative ones, are purely the brand names that came into those many minds when asked in privacy which marine technology products had either pleased or displeased them. The individual response totals then are a mix of at least three factors: market share (how many of the survey takers own, or have owned, some of a brand's products); brand awareness (most may remember whose MFD they use, but not necessarily whose inverter); and brand perception (the emotion that brings a brand name to mind). And there are more complexities beyond...
Since announcing the marine electronics survey on Feb. 8, and showing a bit of data last week, nearly 800 boaters have taken the time to fill one out. Thank you so much! That's a decent data set, I'm told, but 1,000 would be even better. So, by way of encouragement, MTA has again done a little data digging, seen above and below...
Almost 400 marine electronics users have already taken the survey announced here earlier this month, and Marine Technology Analysts (MTA) has done a little preliminary data crunching. Users were asked to name up to three of their favorite sources and, while 152 outlets were named, the top 11 seen above appeared in 60% of the surveys. MTA also tells me that some strong patterns are developing in terms of what users most desire from those sources, not to mention what they want in terms of products. But more data would be great. Please take a 10-15 minute break to fill out the survey today; chances are good that the effort will help the marine electronics industry, Panbo, and ultimately you.
Instead of being "released" in Miami last week, my poor cranium got stuffed to the cobwebbed rafters. Admittedly, there is a phenomenon whereby the longer I cover marine electronics, the better I get to know the developers and the more they want to tell me about their latest projects. But there's something else going on, too: I believe the pace of innovation is increasing (and some healthy trends are emerging). I'll try to hit a few examples today, but it may take weeks to detail all the goodness I saw at the show...
I'm not the sort of guy who usually spends time looking for diagrams and explanations regarding a field like Market Intelligence (MI), but I'm pretty darn sure that the Marine Electronics (ME) industry could really use some help from such specialists. That's why I'm very pleased to introduce a new company called Marine Technology Advisors, whose entire focus is market intelligence. And I'm super pleased to add that Panbo is involved, and that you -- the readers of Panbo -- can really help. It's a win-win-win situation, I think, and I'm excited. You can read more details below, or just dive right into MTA's first Panbo marine electronics survey.
The news from London (reported somewhat differently here) is that Raymarine's board is now negotiating with a single buyer, which is not Garmin, and anticipates a deal in which all debts will be paid off and credit lines extended (but from which share holders may get zilch). Of course the deal is not done, but it sure sounds more certain, and a lot like what many of us were predicting last month. We may not know who the buyer is for a while, but doesn't it seem even less likely that Raymarine will go away? However, part of the due diligence still underway may involve the lawsuit that Honeywell laid on Raymarine, Furuno, and Navico Wednesday...
Raymarine product manager Mark Garland and marketing manager Jim McGowan kindly came to Maine last Thursday and swapped a new E140 Widescreen for the C140W I used for radar comparisons all summer. They were lucky in terms of testing-on-the-Bay weather, but not so lucky in terms of dire sounding Raymarine financial news that I felt compelled to drill them about. I'll save that for last, though, as the E Wide is definitely worth top billing...
In
general the feeling was quietly positive. Everyone still around will probably be able to weather the remainder of the economic storm. Attendance today was lower than the earlier two editions I visited, but then this was my first time visiting on the last day so I can't say for
sure how busy it was. Sorry to say, there was no big big news. Still there were a number of exciting new developments. I've kept those to the end of this long mail!
Heads are still being scratched. Why would SigNet S.A. -- the French holding company that owns MaxSea and MapMedia, and is itself 48% owned by Furuno -- buy Jeppesen's Nobeltec division? And what does this mean for VNS and Admiral users, and marine electronics? I got to talk with all the companies involved yesterday, and am optimistic that Nobeltec customers will benefit from this deal, at least in the short term, and agree with many that the overall possibilities are, um, "interesting"...
