Navman Wellington R&D Team On Growth Path

Media Release: 9 August 2004

NAVMAN WELLINGTON R&D TEAM ON GROWTH PATH

Navman NZ's investment in a Wellington-based research and development (R&D) lab is paying off, with the 9 month-old facility now contributing significantly to the development of new products in the company's marine electronics sector.

Marc Michel, Vice President Navman (Marine) says the Wellington unit complements Navman's larger 160-strong R&D team spread between Auckland and Christchurch.

"The work coming out of Wellington is avant garde, very 'techy' stuff, as you'd expect," says Michel. "They've helped crack the complexities of the marine network modules and have completed a range of projects related to PC products which have not yet been released."

Mr Michel says the Wellington team is specialised in developing hardware platforms based on the Intel XScale ® micro architecture, Altera's CycloneTM FPGA technology, and software using the latest embedded technology from Microsoft.

Navman's Wellington facility was set up in Kelburn's Innovation Greenhouse to help the GPS electronics manufacturer broaden its product range as well as take on new projects from its U.S. parent Brunswick Corporation.

Mr Michel says the Wellington location is slowly opening up new sources of R&D engineers for Navman, which currently employs around 67 development engineers in the company's dedicated Marine R&D teams

"It's no secret we are on an aggressive expansion programme, and we're actively looking for good electronic hardware and embedded software engineers in Wellington," he says. "We're looking for people who like to be involved in a complete project life cycle, rather than just piecemeal. And of course, if they're passionate about boats, that always helps"

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About Navman

a.. Navman is a recognised world leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of high reliability GPS products for the marine, personal GPS, fleet management and OEM markets. The company employs around 530 people world-wide, with its head office in NZ and is part of US-based Brunswick New Technologies. http://www.navman.com

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