Navico Holding AS ("Navico") is a marine electronics manufacturer headquartered at Nyåskaiveien 2, Egersund, Norway. It was created in 2006 through the merger of Simrad Yachting and Lowrance Electronics under Altor Equity Partners, and was later co-owned by Altor Fund IV and Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking. In June 2021, Brunswick Corporation (NYSE: BC) agreed to acquire Navico for approximately $1.05 billion; the business was combined with Brunswick's Advanced Systems Group in 2022 and now operates as Navico Group, a wholly owned Brunswick subsidiary. Brunswick's 2021 announcement cited roughly 2,000 employees globally and $470 million in revenue for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2021 (Wikipedia lists lower figures of ~1,800 employees and $373 million for 2018). Manufacturing is spread across the United States, UK, Norway, Mexico and New Zealand.
Navico designs and sells navigation and marine electronics for recreational and commercial vessels: multi-function displays and chartplotters, fish finders and sonar, radar, autopilots, GPS and AIS equipment, instrumentation, and digital cartography. Its principal brands are Lowrance, Simrad, B&G and C-MAP, with distribution in over 100 countries. It is an operating company with real products, not a non-practicing entity.
Its litigation posture in our data is purely defensive: 0 cases as plaintiff, 2 as defendant. Both tracked matters were filed by Furuno Electric Co. and Furuno U.S.A. on September 23, 2013 — a Section 337 complaint at the U.S. International Trade Commission (investigation 337-TA-900, "Certain Navigation Products," instituted November 8, 2013) and a parallel patent suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon (3:13-cv-01684). Neither is in an NPE-favored venue such as the Eastern District of Texas.
The Furuno matters asserted U.S. Patent Nos. 6,084,565, 6,424,292, 7,161,561 and 7,768,447, covering radar/navigation display systems, against Navico alongside co-respondents Garmin and Raymarine. External context (USITC press releases) shows Navico was also active on the complainant side in a related 2013 ITC sonar-imaging action against Raymarine (337-TA-898), though that matter does not appear in this tracked case set.