Logitech History
Fall 2006
Logitech is the world s leading provider of personal peripherals that people want to buy and love to use. The company designs, manufactures and markets products that make interacting with the digital world more personal and rewarding. In 2006, Logitech is celebrating 25 years of making products renowned for style, quality and innovation. Sold in more than 100 countries, Logitech s personal peripherals are used in the living room,
in the office and on the go enhancing people s experiences with their gaming consoles,
home-entertainment systems, personal computers, iPod/MP3 players, and mobile phones.
Very much a specialist, Logitech is focused solely on personal peripherals, which it distributes through retailers as well as through major computer manufacturers. The company maintains its product leadership by combining continued innovation, awardwinning industrial design and excellent price-performance with core technologies such as wireless, media-rich communications and digital entertainment.
Logitech s ever-expanding product lines now include 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).
A global company with an internationally diverse management team, Logitech has more than 7,200 employees in more than 30 countries. The company has a significant operational presence in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, with its key manufacturing facility in
China. Logitech s largest engineering teams preside in Fremont, Calif., Romanel,
Switzerland, Hsinchu, Taiwan, Vancouver, Wash., and Toronto, Canada, while the company maintains a strong engineering presence in Cork, Ireland and Suzhou, China.
With annual revenues of nearly .8 billion, Logitech is a Swiss public company traded on the SWX Swiss Exchange under the symbol LOGN and on the Nasdaq Global Select
Market under the symbol LOGI.
The Early Days
The idea for Logitech was spawned in 1976 at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif.
While enrolled in a graduate program in computer science at Stanford, Daniel Borel and
Pierluigi Zappacosta formed a friendship that would become a business alliance. While completing their education, Borel, a Swiss, and Zappacosta, an Italian, identified an opportunity to develop an early word-processing system. The pair spent four years securing funding and eventually built a prototype for the Swiss company Bobst.
Shortly thereafter, Borel and Zappacosta joined forces with Giacomo Marini, a former
Olivetti engineer and longtime friend of Zappacosta, on a second venture. The three eventual founders of Logitech began work as consultants in publishing-related software development and hardware architecture. Ricoh awarded them a four-month contract for a feasibility study on developing a graphical editor.
Logitech History Page 2
With this initial funding in hand, Borel, Zappacosta and Marini founded Logitech S.A., on
Oct. 2, 1981, and opened its first office in Apples, Switzerland. Originally, it was to be named Softech because of the software background of the three founders. Since this name was already registered, the founders chose Logitech, using the root of the French word for software: logiciel.
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