TomTom is focusing its mobile strategy on building a platform for developers to use rather than creating its own apps, said CEO Harold Goddijn in the Q4 earnings conference call. “If you look at our business strategy in mobile, I don’t think we should aim to develops tens of small applications, with different phones, different form factors, different operating systems and different functions. That is an awful lot of complexities to deal with. I don’t think it would be a good strategy for us to try to do everything ourselves and build large engineering teams to do specific applications for very specific phones or network operators…However, our strategy is based on the idea of making it simple for networks operators, handsets manufacturers and systems integrators to use Tele Atlas maps in their mobile applications and that involves not only the content but it also involves technology to be able to deploy that content in a very cost effective way that shortens the time to market and the cost of developing these applications,”  Goddijn is quoted as saying in GPS Business. The company plans to release a set of tools and platforms to make it easy and fast to deploy location-based services in a variety of applications and contexts, and let others worry about the porting costs.

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TomTom bought Tele Atlas last year to expand beyond pure navigation devices. It’s coming fairly late to the mobile navigation space, and will have to compete with Nokia and Google, and Vodafone made its own purchase of a mapping company. Still, the mobile phone market is huge and TomTom doesn’t have to be a dominant player in it to have a profitable business.

For the fourth quarter, TomTom saw revenue of 528 million euros (US$672 million) and net profit of 70 million euros ($89 million), well down year-on-year for both TomTom and TeleAtlas. Tele Atlas other revenue, which includes mobile, Internet and Enterprise & Governmental services, increased by 1 million euros compared to the previous quarter of 25 million euros. (Earnings Release)