Logitech Visit
It was my second day in Silicon Valley and off I went to visit Logitech, one of the premier companies in personal peripherals for computers. Guerrino De Luca, CEO of Logitech shared with us the company’s business and personal experiences as a CEO.
He told us about some of the key factors a company should keep in mind before venturing into a new business were firstly, to understand customers’ needs and secondly, to have one’s own cost-saving model to face competition. He illustrated it with one of the key challenges Logitech faced in 1998-2000 in the scanner market with the launch of hand scanners. The popularity of standard printer-like scanners which were cheaper than Logitech’s hand scanners increased tremendously. And henceforth, Logitech felt that they should have known the market well and been ready to face competition at that time. He even shared with us the new fields Logitech is exploring into which are mainly digital music and home. He said that the success of the company depends on having right people at the right places and all of them from engineers to marketers should participate in the innovation of the product.
Being an Italian himself, upon being asked he told us that being Singaporeans, we all have a high success rate in setting up companies or finding a job in global environment of Silicon Valley because of our ability to speak two languages. This skill enables us to think deeply in various matters and gives us an edge over Americans who know just one language.
With insightful questions and answers the visit ended with a group photo with the CEO. There was a lot more to the trip and those who missed can actually see a broadcast which would be posted on NUSEA’s site soon. That’s all from my side. This is Gundeep saying Chao!!