WhereIsAtlas · Technology

What Happened to Garmin?

The GPS gadget company everyone said the smartphone would kill is now richer than ever — by becoming a fitness and wearables juggernaut.

Garmin was supposed to be killed by free smartphone maps, but it pivoted into aviation, marine and especially fitness wearables — where its battery life and rugged build beat phones — and is now more profitable than it ever was.

The gadget the smartphone was supposed to kill

For anyone who drove in the 2000s, Garmin was the little box that said 'recalculating.' Its GPS units were glued to countless windshields, guiding people to destinations with a pleasant voice. It was a genuine household name — and a prime candidate for extinction.

When free maps arrived on smartphones around 2007-08, the conventional wisdom said Garmin was doomed. It wasn't. Today Garmin is more profitable than ever. The story of why is one of the great corporate pivots of the smartphone era.

From the military to your dashboard

Garmin was founded in 1989 by Gary Burrell and Min Kao — the name blends their first names. GPS technology had been developed for the military; Garmin's job was to civilianise it, building the first gadgets that put navigation in a civilian's hand.

It succeeded beyond anyone's expectation. Handheld GPS units, and then dashboard navigation devices, made Garmin the dominant name in personal navigation through the 2000s. And then the smartphone arrived.

The moment everyone wrote Garmin off

When Apple and Google put free, constantly-updated maps into every phone, the $200 standalone GPS unit became hard to justify. Analysts predicted Garmin would go the way of Blockbuster — a category leader made obsolete by a platform shift.

Garmin's stock slumped, and the outlook genuinely looked grim. The company had essentially one product, and that product had just been given away for free by the world's biggest tech companies.

The turnaround

Rather than fight smartphones head-on, Garmin diversified into things phones were bad at: aviation, marine navigation, and above all fitness. Its GPS expertise translated beautifully into sports watches and cycling computers — devices you wear while running, hiking or racing, where a phone is clunky and battery-hungry.

Garmin built rugged, long-battery-life watches that athletes and outdoor enthusiasts genuinely preferred to a smartphone, and it kept iterating on the fitness and wellness features the market came to love.

Where is Garmin now?

Today Garmin is one of the most profitable consumer-electronics companies around. Its Fenix and Forerunner watches are status objects in the running and outdoor worlds, and its aviation, marine and automotive lines keep it diversified. It has become a wearable leader, tied to the boom in quantified self.

That's the twist: the company everyone said smartphones would wipe out is today a beneficiary of the fitness-tracking era. Sometimes the best response to disruption isn't to out-compete it — it's to find the thing your old skills make you uniquely good at.

Sources