Logitech has announced its financial results for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2021 and it’s been a very strong period for the firm.
It saw sales grow by 25 percent with Logitech president and chief executive officer, Bracken Darrell, seeing this as part of a long-term trend for the firm. “We delivered an exceptional first quarter and are raising our fiscal year outlook,” he explained citing how the company’s strategy focuses on four long-term trends.
Those trends? As he explained, “more of us will work from home; video calls will replace audio calls; esports will become as big as conventional sports; and billions of people worldwide will create content, not just a handful of TV and movie studios.” The first one is almost certainly true for the foreseeable future with video calls seemingly far more popular than audio calls now. Many of us are finding ourselves needing to hop onto quick Zoom calls rather than needing to grab our phones, and given Logitech’s well-established reputation for webcams, this is definitely a strong opportunity for the firm.
In the case of esports, there’s been an uptick in the likes of sim racing and FIFA tournaments to counteract the period where we didn’t have conventional sport to watch. That’s before you take into consideration the growth in esports that was there long before the pandemic. Content creation is also far from a new thing so Logitech seems to have figured out exactly where to target most effectively.
Darrell explained that “Logitech’s business was already positioned to grow from these long-term trends, and since early March they have accelerated,” suggesting the firm was in just the right position for the global pandemic. Thanks to this approach, it has raised its annual sales outlook from mid-single-digit sales growth to 10 to 13 percent growth with its annual outlook for non-GAAP operating income from a range of $380 million to $400 million, to a range of $410 million to $425.
It’s clearly been a very good time for Logitech, thanks to its wealth of products that tap into the work-from-home ethos we’ve all needed to embrace in recent times. Given the price of some of its most recent gaming accessories, we’re sure that probably helps a bit too.
It continues to be a curious time to see which tech companies profit most out of this strange era.