Netstar, the vehicle-tracking and telematics business owned by JSE-listed Altron Group, is positioning to turn the movement data it collects from more than 2.2 million vehicles into a commercial data product aimed at advertisers, insurers, banks and government.
The plan was set out at Altron’s capital markets day on Tuesday, where Netstar MD Warren Mande and an AI-generated presenter – a prototype avatar named “Stella” – walked investors through what the company described as a shift from vehicle tracking to a “smart mobility platform”.
Mande said Netstar “has always been a data business”. Every connected vehicle generates location, driving-behaviour and vehicle-diagnostic data – where it goes, how often, when and for how long. Layered with other anonymised Altron datasets, the company said, that becomes “a profile of how and where people move”, which can be segmented into audiences and turned into a “purchase intent signal”.
Netstar outlined a range of buyers for the same underlying dataset:
- Out-of-home media owners proving billboard audiences rather than estimating traffic;
- Short-term insurers using movement as a behavioural risk input;
- Car rental firms rewarding good driving;
- Property developers gauging lifestyle migration into a suburb;
- Retailers mapping catchment areas and competitor footfall;
- Banks siting branches and ATMs “against observed demand rather than guesswork”; and
- Governments planning infrastructure “against observed movement flow instead of survey models”.
The appeal, the company said, is that the data already exists. “No new devices, no incremental capex, just new use cases … one governed anonymised dataset productised to create value for multiple industries,” it told investors.
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Netstar said it has 2.7 million connected devices across 2.2 million vehicles, generating more than 180 billion data points a month, and that processing them through the Altron AI factory allows it to extract sharper predictive insights. Mande described this as a “data moat” that strengthens as customers drive more kilometres – more customers enrich the dataset, which improves the insights, which in turn wins more customers.
Netstar repeatedly described the data as anonymised and “governed”.
Alongside the data strategy, Netstar set out its established business: a stolen-vehicle-recovery operation it said has recovered nearly R2-billion in assets, and a global fleet bureau monitoring more than 39 000 vehicles that it said helped customers avert about 124 000 potential incidents, with bureau customers experiencing roughly 50% fewer safety events per 100km than unmonitored fleets.
Mande said the telematics market was being disrupted and would produce “winners and losers”, with Netstar betting that actionable insights – rather than the tracking device itself – would set it apart. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media