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Nokia has decided to offer navigation services and mapping users (GPS) of its smartphones to capture new customers, “said world number one mobile phone Thursday, January 21. “We provide navigation and pedestrian traffic in 74 countries and 46 languages (…) Ovi Maps will become completely free from now,” said Jukka Hosio, director of marketing at Nokia, at a press conference Helsinki.

To reclaim the market for smartphones, the giant mobile phone will offer its service users navigation and mapping.

The share prices of major GPS manufacturers, competition from new navigation features of mobile phones, have suffered the blow Thursday meeting: Amsterdam, TomTom action fell 10.59% to 5.90 euros at the closed while the U.S. Garmin fell by 4.19% to 34.58 dollars at 16H52 GMT in New York.

The GPS on the decline
After years of strong growth, sales of GPS in the world should fall for the first time in 2009 before rebounding in 2010 and 2011, then a sustained decline, according to research firm iSuppli released last September.

At the same time, the market for smartphones equipped with GPS functionality will explode (32% of users in 2009, 43% in 2010, 50% in 2011). The number of smartphones with navigation should exceed that of GPS in traffic in 2014, whereas today they are twice as likely than the former.

Nokia’s announcement Thursday is equivalent to that of the giant Internet Google to offer free shipping to Droid phone users in the United States. Thus, Nokia is regaining the smartphone niche, where its market share has suffered from the rise of the BlackBerry’s Research In Motion and above the Apple iPhone. “It is a service if practical, so useful that the free offer will certainly attract buyers. But whether this will be enough to stop the decline in market share of Nokia, I do not know,” he commented to the AFP Michael Schroeder, an analyst with Finnish bank FIM.