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Last night on CNBC’s Mad Money, Jim Cramer had an interesting thought regarding merger rumors and speculation.  it was his ‘Speculation Friday" after all.  He surmized that Navteq Corp. (NVT-NYSE) is potentially in-play.  Because of the fact that Navteq is inside the digital mapping systems for Google’s (GOOG-NASDAQ) maps, Cramer thinks that Microsoft (MSFT-NASDAQ) could actually trump Google by acquiring the company. 

This would be an interesting strategy and would create some disarray in the Google Earth enironment.  But the question is how much would it be worth for Microsoft to do this, because the market cap of Navteq is more than $4 Billion already.  This stock closed down 0.6% Friday at $42.57, up from $37.27 on Tuesday.  This wasn’t because of a merger rumor but was because the CEO of Navteq gave positive data presentations at a Lehman conference this week.  This would be an interesting buy, but even after Microsoft spent $6 Billion or more for aQuantive (AQNT-NASDAQ) it would be a wonder if they just teed up another few billion here just to backdoor google.

Jon C. Ogg
June 2, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.