Mighty mouse roars on to new highs
The president of Swiss company Logitech, Daniel Borel, says it's the passion of his employees that has made success at the world's largest maker of computer mice.
He told swissinfo that Logitech was going from strength to strength because of very motivated people who shared a belief that they could “invent the future”, creating new products that people “love to buy”.
The company reported on Thursday that its net profit for the fiscal year ending in March was $230 million (SFr276.6 million) – the ninth consecutive record year.
However, Logitech disappointed some investors at the stock exchange after sales of web cameras were down in the fourth quarter. This caused the group to miss its full-year sales target.
The stock fell by 7.89 per cent in Zurich to finish at SFr31.50. However, it should be noted that over the past 12 months the share price has increased by 23.53 per cent.
Sales for the year were up 15 per cent to $2.07 billion, missing a target of a 17 per cent rise.
swissinfo: You’ve crossed the $2-billion turnover mark and you reckon that will reach $3 billion in the next three years. How important is that for you?
Daniel Borel: Size matters because the larger you are the more economy of scale you have. A few years ago my goal was $1 billion. It took me 20 years to get there and I was surprised that in just five years we got to the second billion. The third will be much more important for me because I realised that in 1984 Hewlett Packard, which now has more than $50 billion, was at $3 billion. I won’t say that we will get to $40 or $50 billion but who knows?
swissinfo: You’re going to launch what you call an innovation incubator at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). What’s the idea exactly?
D.B.: Very well known new companies like Yahoo or Google both came from Stanford University. Lausanne has done a great job at creating an incubator locally with a lot of small companies. We realise how many great ideas and people there are. But too few of those new technologies and innovations are being turned into reality, so we decided to team up with those people and try to extract everything we can which can be turned into real products.
Let’s not forget that the initial mouse of Logitech came from Lausanne, so it’s just expanding what we’ve done previously in a very successful way.
swissinfo: You’ve obviously got an idea of what you might like to produce.
D.B.: The advantage of the EPFL over other universities is that it is very versatile. You find people who study in different fields, and work and live with one another. The mouse was at the intersection of mechanical engineering, of electrical engineering and of software engineering.
I think in Switzerland in general our strength is that we are not just very deep in one direction but we know how to mix and deal with different types of technologies. That’s where you can innovate more than anybody else… This is where we hope we will be able to extract new ideas.
swissinfo: What will drive your company in the future? Where do you see growth opportunities?
D.B.: Our vision of the interface between people and technology has been driving Logitech for the past 25 years and I think that we have been lucky with the mouse. But if you realise today that we have a mouse of the house – the remote controller Harmony – which allows you to get rid of all the other five or six remote controllers you might have, the house or place where we live will become more and more digital, and Logitech knows how to deal and interface with that.
We can supply interfaces that are very user friendly and this is our strength. We believe the home of tomorrow will be full of Logitech products, not just the PC but the whole home.
swissinfo: You’ve told us that in PC navigation there’s going to be a major breakthrough at Logitech. What can we expect?
D.B.: It’s too early but I want to say that over the past 25 years our engineers have been able to bring technologies and ideas in such an innovative way into something that seems to have been there forever. A mouse is a mouse. Well, that’s wrong and you’ll see that the mouse is not just a mouse. We’ll be coming out with a new mouse and hopefully people will say “Wow!”
swissinfo-interview: Robert Brookes in Zurich
Annual figures for fiscal year ending March 31, 2007
Sales: $2.06 billion
Operating income: $230.9 million
Net income: $229.8 million
Employees: around 7,200
More than 150 million products were shipped.
The Logitech chairman – a Swiss – oversees the strategic direction and continuing growth of the company he co-founded and which is now the world’s largest provider of products and tools for the interface between people and technology.
In the early 1980s, Borel and Logitech’s co-founders developed one of the world’s first word processing systems.
After working on a state-of-the-art graphical editing system for Ricoh of Japan, they developed the computer mouse.
Apart from his position at Logitech, Borel is actively involved with helping innovative Swiss start-ups, particularly those with new technology and added values.
The company was founded in Apples, western Switzerland, in 1981.
It focuses solely on personal peripherals, which it distributes through retailers as well as through major computer manufacturers.
The expanding product line includes control devices (keyboards, mice, trackballs, digital writing solutions and advanced universal remote controls), video communications products (webcams and applications), interactive entertainment products (gaming controllers and mobile gaming accessories) and audio products (multimedia speakers and headsets for gaming, music, internet voice access, mobile phones and portable music players).
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