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Who will be the alliance partner for Pioneer’s car navigation system business?
[2009, March 18]
The pioneer sounded three companies, Mitsubishi Electric, Alpine, and Clarion about the business tie-up by in-vehicle apparatus, such as car navigation systems. Although an alliance is realized or there are also opaque surfaces, “technical compatibility” is compared from viewpoints, such as competition and the subsidiary of research and development, here using XLUS. The figure shows distribution of car navigation products patented applications with a pioneer and each of three companies. Patent content close application is clusterized and is expressed with one circle. What has a large path of a cluster includes many patent applications. Moreover, as for the cluster, what has near contents is arranged mutually in the neighborhood. Therefore, technically, a near cluster forms one group area and corresponds to the technical element with which each differs. In Fig. 1, strengths of both companies are divided distinctly. As a result, Alpine seems to be congenial as a corporate partner. That is, Pioneer covers about the basic function of car navigation. On the other hand, Alpine covers operations and displays area. The technology complements has been performed well. This latter area is a business area where Alpine stands on predominance also in three companies of tie-up candidate points. In Figs. 2 and 3, Clarion has the feature in GPS or the speech recognition products, and seems to have a complement relation in respect of technology relatively with a pioneer. On the other hand, in the case of Mitsubishi Electric, rate of duplicates of technology is high, and a technologic complementary relationship seems to be small. As mentioned above, if it compares from a “technical compatibility” side, the thing with a large partnership benefits will become the order of Alpine, Clarion, and Mitsubishi Electric.