First AGCO, now Qual­comm — Top­con Tierra is on the move. Qual­comm begins to tran­si­tion out of the con­struc­tion equip­ment mar­ket with their announce­ment that Top­con Tierra will acquire some of Qualcomm’s cus­tomer con­tracts for their Glob­al­TRACS fleet man­age­ment suite. This raises eye­brows and ques­tions. In addi­tion to the numer­ous high-​​profile cus­tomers Qual­comm had already acquired, just last July they announced that JCB, the largest privately-​​held con­struc­tion machin­ery man­u­fac­turer in the world, and LOXAM, Europe’s lead­ing con­struc­tion equip­ment rental com­pany, had also adopted the Glob­al­TRACS sys­tem. JCB has since begun test­ing and devel­op­ment of a co-​​branded prod­uct under the LiveLink brand that was sched­uled to be placed on all of their heavy machin­ery at the fac­tory.

At this time there has not been an announce­ment as to what con­tracts specif­i­cally Top­con will acquire but, con­sid­er­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties involved with adopt­ing any new tech­nol­ogy, every cus­tomer around that globe that is uti­liz­ing the Glob­al­TRACS sys­tem should be concerned.

This past March Top­con made a splash in the US when the AGCO Cor­po­ra­tion selected them as their sole provider of remote asset man­age­ment tech­nol­ogy for their global telem­at­ics ini­tia­tive under the AGCONNECT brand name. This is a multi-​​year agree­ment that includes all of AGCO’s equip­ment lines, very sig­nif­i­cant con­sid­er­ing they are a top 5 man­u­fac­turer of agri­cul­ture equip­ment around the globe. How­ever, Topcon’s exper­tise is in posi­tion­ing equip­ment, not M2M com­mu­ni­ca­tions. So a cau­tion­ary con­grat­u­la­tions, these next few months should be interesting.