NAVTEQ, GeoEye Stars Rising with Stock Analysts; Are Acquisitions Not Far Away?

NAVTEQ’s (NVT) star seems to be rising again as the stock was up over 8% today after it made a presentation at Lehman Brother’s Wireless conference. Still off its 52-week high of $45 per share, the company’s recent acquisitions of Traffic.com and The Map Network may have given the analysts something to think about when it hears things like "a GPS in every phone" and "the number of vehicles offering nav systems is tripling." In other words, the market for map and map-related data is soaring and NAVTEQ is holding the keys to the kingdom. Plus, the message boards were ripe with rumors of a takeover. Although this is not new news, the possibility of NAVTEQ or Tele Atlas being acquired by someone like Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google offers a unique, and I would say, monopolistic move to dominate the opportunities of location-based services.

I would also suggest that a satellite data provider like GeoEye (GEOY), a company whose stock was up 5.5% today, is another takeover candidate by the aforementioned threesome. With Microsoft announcing new street level, 3D viewing features in VE, Yahoo creating its own mapping platform, and Google vying to get KML as an OGC standard, there is ample evidence that "maps" are a sustaining battleground in a Web 2.0 world. Therefore, is it a stretch to think that foundation data like streets and satellite imagery would not be on the acquisition list of the big three? In less than 12 months, we’ll have an answer.