Furuno Electric Co., Ltd., 2013 Earnings Call, Apr 18, 2013

Furuno Electric Co., Ltd. announced that the new multi-GNSS receiver chips eRideOPUS 6 and eRideOPUS 7 will be available to the market from August 2013 onward. The new receiver chips are multi-GNSS compliant single-chip LSIs, capable of concurrently receiving signals from multiple satellites in GNSS systems, i.e., GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, etc., and satellite-based augmentation systems as well as Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System. The ability of concurrently receiving GNSS/GNSS augmentation signals from multiple satellites from different satellite services means that the receivers have more probability of acquiring a greater number of satellites at any single point of time. Subsequently, position stability as well as accuracy will be greatly improved, minimizing the chance of a position lost. Also, the receiver chips incorporate an enhanced level of noise rejection capability, implementing the anti-jamming function as well as the improvement of multi-path mitigation. Time-to-first-fix capability of the existing eRideOPUS 5 (no more than 1 second when hot started) is retained in these new receiver chips with a combination of A-GPS compatibility and self-ephemeris (TM) extraction. Moreover, the position update rate of the new receiver chips is greatly improved, achieving a 10 Hz update (every 0.1 second), which is twice as fast as the capability achieved by eRideOPUS 5. The new receiver chips are capable of dead reckoning navigation, using a gyro sensor and vehicle speed pulse signals, a gyro sensor and an acceleration sensor, and wheel tick data taken from a CAN-Bus network, achieving high positioning accuracy even in locations where satellite signal reception is not available, such as inside tunnels. In May 2013, FURUNO is planning to start the delivery of evaluation kits for the receiver chips so that third-party manufacturers can evaluate the feasibility of incorporating the receiver chips into their products, and in August 2013, the new compact GNSS receiver module GN-86/GN-87 as well as dead-reckoning-capable GV-86/GV-87, using these new receiver chips, will be made available for automotive navigation systems as well as eCall systems.

Furuno Electric Co., Ltd. announced that they will report fiscal year 2013 results on Apr 15, 2013