24/7 Wall St. ranked the top America’s Most Profitable Products in the nation and our own, local Garmin is in the right in the thick of it:
7. Garmin nüvi
- Operating margin: 15%
- Revenue: $1.2 billion
- Market share: Greater than 50%
- Industry: Consumer electronics
Garmin is a navigation device company, focusing on GPS technology. By far, the most profitable of the company’s five divisions on a dollar basis, despite the fact that other divisions of the company have better margins, is the automotive/mobile group. This division makes and sells Garmin’s GPS units. This segment accounted for 55% of the company’s sales in 2012 — $221 million in operating profit on $1.5 billion in revenue. By comparison, none of the other four segments accounted for more than 15% of sales. Much of the segment’s success was due to Garmin’s nüvi product line, which accounted for 43% of the company’s total revenue in 2012. Garmin is by far the largest participant in the GPS market, with over a 50% market share, according to Consumer Reports.Rather ironically, our old, formerly downtown
Folgers Coffee was ranked 6th, too, so Kansas City was rather well-represented, in its own way.