Garmin
More info
- Creator
- Gary Burrell, Min Kao
- Released
- 1989
- Type
- GPS equipment
- Website
- garmin.com
The GPS maker that survived the phone eating its car-navigation business by moving to the wrist, the cockpit and the boat.
The name is the founders' first names jammed together: Gary Burrell and Min Kao, who started the company in Kansas in 1989, when GPS was still mostly a military affair. The first product was a marine navigator, and avionics became a profitable niche early on. In the 2000s Garmin shipped car sat-navs by the truckload — until smartphones with free maps made them redundant within a few years.
What saved it was sports watches and bike computers, where battery life and ruggedness beat the phone. The downside of syncing everything through the cloud became obvious in July 2020, when the WastedLocker ransomware attack took Garmin Connect and its production lines down for days. The company has never confirmed reports that a ransom was paid.