OLATHE, KANSAS: Garmin Ltd, which has had a presence in Asia since its year of inception in 1989, with its first production facility in Xizhi, New Taipei City, sees much potential in the region especially for its marine, automotive original equipment manufacturing (OEM) and aviation segments.
"Everything is different in Asia and we work very hard to serve customers there. There's lots more opportunity in every country to grow market share in existing product categories as well as gain access to markets where we are not very present right now," Garmin president and chief executive officer Cliff Pemble said during a rare interview with Asian media at its headquarters in Olathe, Kansas last month.
While most known for its fitness smartwatches across Asia, Garmin is present in four other segments, outdoor, aviation, marine and automotive OEM.
Pemble said, the marine segment is an example of a potential growth segment for Asia.
He added that the Asia-Pacific region's contribution to the group's total revenue of US$5 billion
last year, were in the "high-tens"representing 16 per cent of the company's revenue, with lots of room to grow.
Currently its biggest markets in the region are China, Japan and Taiwan.
The fitness segment contributed 26 per cent to total revenue, outdoor segment 32 per cent, aviation 16 per cent, marine 18 per cent, while the auto OEM business accounted for eight per cent.
Despite its size Garmin, which is a big believer in vertical integration, has a surprisingly large manufacturing footprint in this part of the world with one facility in China and four in Taiwan.
Taiwan also houses an eight-member industrial design team which was set up about nine years ago.
While it started out as a very Asia Pacific region centric team, it is now very much a part of the group's global design team.
When one considers that half of Garmin is Dr Min Kao, who is Taiwanese though, perhaps this is not so surprising.
"As we evaluate our business growth, we will look at what we need for (manufacturing) capacity, so right now we don't have any decisions but are constantly looking, and we do see a lot of possibilities in the markets here," Pemble said.
He added that the smart-watch market alone is about 75 million units a year, illustrating the need for additional capacity.
For perspective, last year Garmin shipped about 16 million devices out of its facilities.
"Our vertical integration saved us in the supply chain crisis, because we absolutely had suppliers who unexpectedly raised their hand and said they are not going to ship anymore because they don't have parts," Pemble said.
"That's a very scary thing but what we were able to do was quickly find alternatives and design alternatives into our products, introduce it into our production, in a fast way and we were able to supply the market much better than other companies could, because we had this capability," he added.
On the merits of reshoring given geopolitical instability prevalent today, Pemble is unconvinced that it is the answer.
"Reshoring is interesting because it's easy to talk about, and very difficult to do," he said.
"We mostly put factories in places and kept them there. For example aviation has been in the US since the beginning, our consumer products started in Taiwan and expanded a little bit to China, and we have automotive factories in Europe and for indoor cycling. It would be very difficult to take all of our indoor cycling and move them to the US, I don't think that is possible.
So I think global view is still always important and supply chains are still coming from many different places, so reshoring itself is not necessarily an answer," Pemble explained.
Garmin's office in Malaysia began operations in 2023.
It is part of some 24 offices Garmin has in the Asia Pacific region, manned by 9,500 associates.
To support the growing running community across Asia, Garmin launched its Garmin Run Asia Series in Malaysia three years ago, with this year's series kicking off in October 2024.