Garmin Ltd.

Garmin Ltd. is a Swiss-domiciled, American-rooted technology company that designs, manufactures, and sells GPS-enabled navigation, communication, and sensor-based products across five markets — fitness, outdoor, aviation, marine, and auto OEM — generating $7.25 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Founded in 1989 by Gary Burrell and Min H. Kao to bring GPS navigation to general aviation, Garmin has evolved into one of the world's largest wearable-technology platforms, delivering over 300 million products across its history and more than 20 million in 2025 alone.

This is a story about a business that quietly became essential to its customers while most of the market was watching smartphone-driven obsolescence take down its original automotive PND franchise. The handheld GPS category that once accounted for over half of Garmin's revenue shrank from $1.6 billion in 2011 to roughly $665 million today — yet consolidated revenue nearly tripled over the same period, from $2.8 billion to $7.2 billion. The company pulled off a transformation that few hardware businesses manage: it let a declining legacy business fund a portfolio of new ones, each built on the same vertical-integration model, and emerged with margins that improved along the way.

The file turns on a single question: whether the wearable platform — the fitness and outdoor segments that now represent over 60% of revenue — can sustain its growth trajectory as the category matures and competition intensifies, or whether Garmin is approaching a period where aviation, marine, and the emerging auto OEM business must carry more of the load.