Thoughts on the PC Market From Logitech

Logitech makes peripheral products for PCs: keyboards, mouses, webcams, etc.  I thought this was an interesting and impassioned statement made by the CEO at a tech conference a couple weeks ago.  He may be a biased source, but his argument is that the demise of the personal computer relative to tablets and smart-phones is greatly overstated.

I think that the issues that we have had in the past two or three years, is to believe what the naysayers were saying, is to believe that the potential for growth around the PC platform in the established consumer developed market was gone. It is not. And it is not because I’m blind and I don’t see the growth of the iPads and tablets and I don’t see the declining or very modest growth of the PC platform, but new sales in the PC platform, we see all of that.

But first of all there is just way too many PCs out there to be discounted, I don’t know of anybody that bought an iPad who threw away his laptop, in fact the laptop and the PC in general continues to be used in certain circumstances and as the iPad becomes the mobile platform of choice your laptop PC is even more residential and even more friendly to add-ons. So I think that we believed it because everybody was telling as this and it's because it's the simple thing to believe and in fact that was a mistake. In fact I don’t believe it at all, I think that obviously we have tremendous opportunities in emerging markets and around the PC of course, largely underpenetrated but we have solid opportunities across the number of categories in the western world in addition to what we are putting together more intensively which is a focus on PC peripherals in the business market, which is way underpenetrated on our side, and it's an add-on chance.