Innovation and Acquisition - The Growth Driver for Trimble

Trimble an engineering products, navigation and surveying company, growing continuously for the past few decade steadily. From 100+ M in early 1990s to 1.6 billion in 2011. The growth is not an exponential one as they have concentrated on their core business of engineering products, surveying and complementing business.

They are doing business on surveying, navigation and construction instrument production. Later they introduced the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) into their surveying and navigation. They are the first company to introduce the GPS technology into commercial and traditional products. They were investing more on this technology.

In 1990 they went on public the first GPS company to go on public and started growing gradually. Their growth during 90s was vey slow and in 2000s it had ups and downs with the world economic fluctuations.

Their growth rate started increasing from 2000 onwards due to more concentration on investing on innovation of new technology and acquisition of complementing companies.

As per their CEO Steve Berglund,

“Continued innovation is a primary driver for us”

In addition he says acquisition also contributed for their growth.

" Acquisitions have played a role in our strategy, principally as mechanisms to establish beachheads in new market spaces, fill in product line gaps, or add new technologies to our solutions portfolio."

Their current IP portfolio has 850 US and international patent and they have acquired more than 35 companies. They are investing continuously on R&D that is 10-15% of their revenue is spent on their R&D every year. 

They were concentrating on the below to grow 

• Investing on R&D and do more Innovation
• introducing the latest technology into their existing products 
• Acquiring companies that are complementing their products
• Joint venture with companies to provide solution to enterprise 

Their major acquisitions are

• Spectra Precision Group - Offers Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), optical total stations, data collection hardware, field and office software
• Applanix Corporation - products for mapping and positioning from mobile platforms (air, land and sea).
• GeoNav GmbH of Wunstorf, Germany - A provider of customized field data collection solutions for the cadastral survey.
• Apache Technologies, Inc. of Dayton, Ohio. Apache designs, manufactures, and distributes professional laser products for construction leveling and alignment applications.
• Tekla Corporation - a leading provider of Building Information Modeling ("BIM") software
• Yamei Electronics Technology, Co. Ltd, PeopleNet, GEOTrac Systems Inc....

Many of their acquisitions happened in the last few years and that is one f the reasons for the growth.

Their joint venture is with the following companies

• Catterpiller Inc.
• Nikon corporation
• China Aerospace Science & Industry Academy of Information Technology (CASIC-IT)
• China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group Co. Ltd. (CREEC)

By providing enhancements to the existing products and adding complementing products (by direct R&D or Acquisition or by joint venture) any company can have a steady growth for decades. Of course the execution is one of the factors. Trimble is the best example for that under Steve Berglund (President and CEO from 2000 to till now).

Saravanan