The installed base of fleet management systems in Europe will reach 10.6 million by 2020

The number of active fleet management systems deployed in commercial vehicle fleets in Europe was 5.3 million in Q4-2015, according to a new research report from the M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight. Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.9 percent, this number is expected to reach 10.6 million by 2020. All the top-9 vendors have today more than 100,000 active units in Europe.

TomTom’s subscriber base has grown both organically and by acquisitions during the past years and the company has now reached the position as the largest provider of fleet management solutions on the European market and reached an installed base of about 529,000 units at year-end 2015. Masternaut is still in second place and had achieved an installed base of an estimated 350,000 units at the year-end.

Berg Insight ranks Microlise as the third largest player in terms of active installed base with around 175,000 units. ABAX, Teletrac Navman, Transics, Trimble and OCEAN (Orange) also have more than 100,000 active devices in the field. The HCV manufacturers are now growing their subscriber bases considerably in Europe thanks to standard line fitment of fleet management solutions. Dynafleet by Volvo, FleetBoard by Daimler and Scania Fleet Management are the most successful with active subscriber bases of 81,000 units, 86,000 units and 133,000 units respectively as of Q4-2015. The consolidation trend on this market continued in 2016.

“Nine major mergers and acquisitions have taken place in the past three quarters among the vendors of fleet management systems in Europe”, said Johan Fagerberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight.

TomTom acquired Finder in Poland in December 2015, which added another 60,000 vehicles to its installed base. ITmobile operating from the Netherlands was acquired by Canadian Fleet Complete in December 2015. Viasat entered the Polish market when CMA Monitoring was acquired in April 2016 adding 18,000 vehicle subscriptions and later in July the company also picked up EMIXIS that is headquartered in Belgium adding another 23,000 subscriptions. The investment firm Sofindev acquired a majority stake in GeoDynamics in April. GSGroup has acquired three companies in the past years and the most recent one was PPCT in Finland in May. Later in June, it was announced that Verizon had signed an agreement to acquire Telogis.

The latest transaction was done in August when Verizon acquired also Fleetmatics for a price tag of US$ 2.4 billion to become the largest fleet management solution vendor worldwide. The two recent deals mean that Verizon’s telematics unit will have more than 1.6 million vehicles under management. Mr. Fagerberg anticipates that the market consolidation of the still overcrowded industry will continue in 2016–2017.