Navico Brand Guidelines: Simrad, Lowrance & B&G Under One Roof, Now Inside Brunswick

A private-equity merger in 2006.

Navico is the marine electronics business behind the Simrad, Lowrance and B&G brands. It was created in 2006, when the Swedish private-equity firm Altor merged two companies it owned: Simrad Yachting, the Norwegian leisure-electronics business that an Altor fund had bought from the Kongsberg Group in 2005, and Lowrance Electronics, the fishfinder maker based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which the same fund bought in 2006, according to English Wikipedia. Simrad Yachting had already bought the British sailing-instrument maker B&G in 2003, so the new company began with three established names.

Each of those brands was older than the company that now owned it. English Wikipedia traces Simrad to Simonsen Radio, founded in Norway in 1946 to make radio equipment for fishing boats; B&G to Brookes & Gatehouse, founded in Britain in 1955; and Lowrance to 1957, when it launched a portable sonar for anglers known as the “Little Green Box.” Navico itself has no history before 2006: from the start it was a parent name for brands with their own customers.

The group grew quickly. In March 2007 Panbo reported that Navico had closed its purchase of Northstar, Navman and MX Marine, the marine electronics businesses that Brunswick had grouped as Brunswick New Technologies, a month after the deal was announced in Miami. The press release quoted by Panbo gave Navico’s headquarters as Lysaker, near Oslo, with development and manufacturing sites in places including Egersund in Norway, Romsey in England, Tulsa, Ensenada in Mexico and Auckland in New Zealand. English Wikipedia now gives the headquarters as Egersund, on Norway’s south-west coast, and says the Simrad Professional range absorbed MX Marine in 2008.

From private equity to Brunswick.

Navico changed hands inside the private-equity world before it found an industrial owner. In 2016, English Wikipedia says, citing Boating Magazine, Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking and a newer Altor fund agreed to buy Navico from the original Altor fund; the same year the company expanded its manufacturing plant in Ensenada. In 2017 it bought C-MAP, the chart and cartography company founded in 1985, and English Wikipedia says most of C-MAP’s commercial-shipping business was sold to Lloyd’s Register in December 2020, while the leisure charts stayed with Navico.

In June 2021 the American boat and engine group Brunswick Corporation announced that it would buy Navico. Panbo reported on 24 June 2021 that Navico would join Brunswick’s Advanced Systems Group. Trade Only Today, in July 2021, described Navico as a Norway-based company, the parent of Lowrance, B&G, Simrad and C-MAP, owned until then by Altor Fund IV and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with staff based mainly in Spain, the United States, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The story had a circle in it: as Panbo pointed out, Brunswick had owned Northstar, Navman and MX Marine before selling them to Navico in 2007.

The name then grew larger than the company. On 3 August 2022 Marine Industry News reported that Brunswick had formed Navico Group to replace its Advanced Systems Group, combining Navico and the battery maker RELiON, both acquisitions completed in late 2021, with the older group’s brands. Those included power and boat-systems names such as Mastervolt, CZone, Blue Sea Systems and MotorGuide, and the report described the new group as serving the marine, recreational-vehicle, specialty-vehicle and industrial markets. A word that had begun as the label for a 2006 merger became the name of a Brunswick division with many more brands than the original three.

Design and documentation.

Marine electronics and satellite-communications companies tend to present themselves through their equipment first. Their websites lead with product photographs of radars, chartplotters, sonar displays, antennas and satellite terminals, usually shown on a plain background or mounted on a mast, a wheelhouse roof or a radar arch. Domes and displays are shot from the same few angles so that a whole range reads as one family, and model names, sizes and frequency bands do much of the descriptive work.

Coverage is the second recurring image. Satellite-service providers and antenna makers publish coverage maps for each network or plan, from regional cellular zones to global satellite beams, and many now show several networks side by side as low-orbit services join older geostationary ones. Bridge and wheelhouse photography carries the human side: officers at consoles, screens glowing in a dark bridge, yachts at anchor, fishing boats and offshore vessels at work.

Airtime and connectivity plans are a large part of how these companies describe themselves. Data allowances, subscription terms, crew-internet packages and backup services are laid out in plan tables, named and grouped the way each company chooses, and a hardware maker may sell plans on its own network next to those of other operators. Network-management software, cyber security services and content for crews increasingly sit alongside the hardware.

Partner pages complete the picture. Dealer and installer networks, service points in ports, and the satellite operators and equipment makers a company works with are listed with their own names and marks. This guide describes each company’s identity from dated sources and the company’s own pages, and the colours and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations rather than reproductions of any mark.

A parent name behind older brands.

Today Navico Group is a division of Brunswick Corporation, as Marine Industry News described it in September 2026. Its president since 2024 has been Aine Denari, who also serves as Brunswick’s chief technology officer; in September 2026 Brunswick announced that she would become its chief executive on 1 January 2027. In June 2026 the group announced changes at its Lowell, Michigan, facility, including space there for Brunswick’s Land ’N’ Sea distribution business, and said it would keep reviewing how it uses its sites.

New products still appear under the older brand names. At the Miami Boat Show in February 2026, B&G introduced the Zeus SRX chartplotter in 16-inch and 22-inch formats, running the NEON operating system and linking to CZone digital switching, Halo radar and B&G’s Triton 2 and Nemesis instruments, Marine Industry News reported. In October 2026 the same title reported that the boatbuilder Saxdor was building Simrad AutoCaptain, a system for docking, undocking and short-distance manoeuvring that works with Mercury propulsion and a dedicated Simrad display app, into its range. In September 2026 Navico Group announced a partnership with the Italian audio maker Elettromedia, under which Audison and Hertz became its preferred audio brands and Navico Group’s brands became Elettromedia’s preferred display platform for boats.

That pattern runs through the record. In the reports used for this guide, chartplotters, radar and sonar launch as Simrad, Lowrance or B&G products, each with its own audience — powerboat owners, anglers and sailors, in English Wikipedia’s summary — while Navico Group appears as the parent in press releases, executive titles and partnership announcements.

For a design guide, Navico shows how a parent company can stay in the background while older brands face the customer. Compare Simrad, the Norwegian name it inherited, and Lowrance, its fishing brand. For this guide we use a fjord ink, a chart blue and a sonar teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Navico’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.