Garmin

Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), incorporated in George Town, Cayman Islands, is the parent company of a group of companies founded in 1989 by Gary Burrell and Min Kao (hence the name GarMin), that develops consumer, aviation, and marine technologies for the Global Positioning System. more...

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Its subsidiary Garmin International, Inc. serves as headquarters for the Garmin Limited companies and is located in Olathe, Kansas, which is located in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. The largest operating subsidiary and primary production facility of Garmin Limited is Garmin (Asia) Corporation (Chinese: 台灣國際航電股份有限公司), located in Sijhih City, Taiwan, a suburb of Taipei.

Founders and company origins

Gary Burrell, born in 1937, earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University and a graduate degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He went to work for King Radio, a manufacturer of aviation radios in 1963 only six years after that company had been started by Edward King Jr. in a farmhouse in Olathe, Kansas. A certificated pilot, Burrell led development on some of King’s most successful navigation and communications products. King went on to supply Boeing with radio equipment starting in 1969.

By 1989 Burrell had spent nearly his entire professional career — with the exception of a brief stint at Lowrance Electronics — working for King Radio. During these years the company went through many corporate changes. In 1983 King was acquired by the Allied Corporation and combined with the former Bendix Corporation to form Bendix-King. Allied later went on to merge with the Signal Companies in 1993 to form AlliedSignal which acquired Honeywell in 1999 and then took its name.

Min H. Kao (Name in Chinese: 高民環), was born in 1949 in a small town in Taiwan called Chushang (Chinese: 竹山, pinyin: Zhúshān) in Nantou (南投縣). After serving in the Taiwanese navy he attended National Taiwan University and moved to the United States to attend the University of Tennessee where he obtained advanced degrees in Electrical Engineering. While a graduate student, he did research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the United States Army. He later went on to work for the American defense contractors Teledyne and Magnavox.

Burrell hired Kao to join his division at Allied’s King subsidiary in 1983. Kao had been working at Magnavox developing military navigation systems using the Global Positioning System constellation of satellites, which at the time was still known by the name NAVSTAR. During his years working with Burrell, Kao led the team that developed the first GPS navigation system that was to be certified for use in airplanes by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

Burrell left Allied Corp. in 1989. Convinced that the company should have been more aggressive in pursuing products based on GPS technology, he disappointedly found management did not agree with this conception. He took to interviewing for jobs at other companies including Magnavox, but couldn’t find a good fit. A deeply religious Christian, Burrell had been a founding member in 1984 of Olathe’s Indian Creek Community Church. Having left his job at Allied, he was considering devoting himself full-time to the ministry. However, over dinner, Kao asked Burrell if he had ever thought about starting his own company. Burrell replied that he hadn’t, but then went on to say that if he were to start a company, he would do so only with Kao. Both agreed that the future of navigation would be closely linked with GPS technology.

Read more at Wikipedia.org