After a first night in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, we have spent a very busy day and a first experience with a so called Typhoon.
We have had the chance to have a chinese lunch at HKUST and have had a very interesting exchange session with some HKUST students, who all have begun a startup in different fields.
Then we took the MTR to go downtown, and I was pretty impressed by the lenght of the metro, so here is an overview of how deep the metro is :
We were then received by Jean-Marc Flückiger, who is in the product management team at logitech and his collegue Richard Milhe, engineer head for the mobility.
They received us very generously at their offices in Hong Kong. If you don’t know, Logitech is a swiss company that started 35 years ago in a garage and that grew very fast.
Their activity is mainly based on doing accessories for tablet, especially Ipads but it is always a challenge, because Apple keeps their specs secret until they launch their products, which makes it hard for logitech to be on the market as fast as the tablet, when it comes out.
They are a leading brand for headsets, mice and keyboards and have lately acquired UE (you have definitely heard of the UE Boom box, and if it is not the case, I personnaly advise you to get one ;-))
Our meeting with them was really interesting on several aspects. First of all, they have confirmed to us that they were doing a so called “rebranding” to rejuvenate the brand. This is for us a pretty good news. We all know the quality of the logitech product and as innovation seekers, we can’t wait to see what they are planning for the near future. We think that the products they will launch to support the rebrand should definitely be worth our strongest interest.
What I mainly take out of the meeting is that the industry is changing and this happens really fast. They needed to rethink a bit their strategy given all the changes happening. But their strategy now, which is to “prepare their ingredients” for their products before the product for which it will be used for is even launched is a very smart and proactive strategy to be as fast as possible on the market. It gives them a lot of flexibility.
After the Logitech meeting, we went for a late dinner and a walk near the seaside. The view of the buildings was amazing. The streets were all empty because of the typhoon. But after this long day, we were happy to get back home and maybe… to get some sleep.
Dina Elikan