MIN sits down with Kevin Lott – Garmin EMEA sales director, audio – to understand how the firm’s buying spree feeds into its plan for a tech-heavy boating future.
In September 2023, Garmin completed its purchase of JL Audio. The latter’s strong market position in the US, in-house manufacturing capabilities and premium product offerings made it an attractive acquisition despite Garmin already owning an audio brand. And in October 2024, it acquired Lumishore.
Kevin Lott believes that there are two groups of customers for audio: those who want their boat to feel like their car, and those who want it to feel like their home.
“We spend a lot more time in our cars and our homes than we do on our boats. On board, we want it to resonate with living and lifestyle experiences,” he says.
The ‘car’ experience is where everything is on a big display. It’s all about the steering wheel and the helm, while people on larger boats are enjoying what Lott describes as a ‘living’.
“They want that kind of home experience where they can stream their music into multiple rooms playing the same across the whole boat… or have different music in different areas. We cater to both of those markets with both sound and light… and create a user experience that gives them familiar territories.”
This has become possible for Garmin – a firm that prides itself on its vertical integration (designing, engineering and manufacturing everything from its watch portfolio to its Fusion stereo head units in its own factories) – through thoughtful acquisition.
Uncomplicated acquisition of strategic companies
It’s nearly two years since the company acquired JL Audio (famous for its audio abilities and speaker technologies), and a decade prior it was Fusion (that deal completed in June 2014). But the ethos has remained the same.
“We try and make things complicated on the inside, but simple on the outside,” Lott says.
That means having products that plug and play, rather than having to wire-up bare cables or having one set of products with an adaptor to control and connect into another series of products.
“To make it as intuitive as possible to operate, and to install, makes it really enjoyable for the end user, and makes it as hassle-free as possible for the boatbuilder,” says Lott.
Garmin’s traditional acquisitions have looked for smaller companies with technologies that it doesn’t necessarily have in-house, except in the case of JL Audio. Garmin already owned an audio brand, Fusion Entertainment.
The brands were competing in different markets but with different product lineups and market shares in different regions. JL Audio was very strong in the United States with large market share, more so than in Europe. It was a market leader in speakers and amplifiers, while Fusion was the marine market leader in stereo head units. The brand positions complemented each other in both markets.
US manufacturing plant helps secure future strategy
Additionally, JL Audio had its own manufacturing in-house in the United States. Lott says that’s a “world-class facility” for building speakers. Garmin values vertical integration, so this was really appealing and it offered a new opportunity to go in new directions “in terms of the kind of custom tuning that JL Audio offers, and the high-end installs (premium product as regards to technical capabilities and market position).
“In the US, a lot of people were mixing and matching the brands with Fusion stereos and JL’s amplifiers and end units, amplifiers and speakers. The acquisition gave us an opportunity to tie those things together.”
The fact that JL Audio manufactures in the US was a boon and has played out very well, given the USA’s political situation.
“JL Audio being manufactured in Miramar, Florida, is a great benefit right now. There’s no secret that Garmin’s main manufacturing facilities are in Taiwan. We’ve had our own factories there for more or less the entirety of our business existence.
“So we deal with tariffs all the time. They’re pretty challenging, but we try and make sure that we can deliver the best value for our business and for our customers.”
Garmin to expand audio offering
JL Audio also operates in car and home audio, which are areas where Garmin wasn’t present with its Fusion portfolio.
“There are some good opportunities to expand the JL Audio range. Car and RV audio development for us is a major area where we already have a lot of experience from other products in the Garmin range. Home audio is a new(ish) market for us – it’s premium and not necessarily in the mass retail markets that some of our products are in.”
While car, home and marine audio all sit within Garmin’s overall marine segment, in terms of audio, marine remains the largest part (Fusion only operates in marine). Lott says this is “a huge opportunity to look at ways in which we can develop better products for all three markets.
“We can take what we already do in this sector and apply it to the home audio business, where customisation and custom installs (lighting and home theatre) are huge drivers. Lighting and acoustics are often the same dealers and installers – they’re using a hand-in-hand approach.”
Lumishore joins the mix
Lumishore joined Garmin’s ecosystem in October 2024. The former designs and manufactures its deck, mood and underwater lighting in-house (Swansea, Wales), which Lott says Garmin “loves, because that’s what we do as a business.”
He notes that he doesn’t have oversight of Lumishore but says it was a more ‘traditional’ acquisition as it “was a category that is perfectly aligned with our marine business.” And when it was bought, Lumishore (like JL Audio) was already integrated with Garmin’s multifunction displays.
“Tying automated processes together can create an amazing user experience. You can walk on a boat and have the lighting automatically turn on, or you can come on board and have music. It creates ‘sound to light’ so the beat and the tone of the music can affect the lighting around the boat. If you think about a nightclub or a party where the lights are flashing in time with the music, that’s one extreme, but you can have a subtle version of that.”
Boatbuilders driving integration
Lott says that much of this controllability is driven by boatbuilders. “There’s a lot of demand to make whole systems integrated. Boatbuilders want their customers to feel like everything is part of their ecosystem, and that’s what we try to achieve.”
Neither users nor boatbuilders want fragmented controls/displays/user interfaces. “They don’t want to have to learn one thing for their audio system and then have to go learn a different thing for their lighting, and learn a different thing for their autopilot and their radar and sonar.”
This is especially important as the number of days per year people use their boats is pretty low on average, compared to the time they spend doing other things.
“If you use a complicated system half a dozen times a year you never learn it properly,” he says. “We’ve got to make systems as simple as possible so that time on the water is as hassle-free as possible. Once you’ve learned one control method, it should be consistent across the whole boating experience and as intuitive as possible.
“People just want to enjoy their time on the water, they want to get out and listen to some music, they want to relax in an evening. Our goal is to try and tick as many of those boxes as possible so that customers can enjoy that time.
“It also makes a boatbuilder’s life a lot easier. They can get on with the business of building reliable boats. When the customer takes delivery, boatbuilders don’t want to be bombarded with questions because everything’s so complicated to use.”
With both JL Audio and Lumishore already partnering with One Helm, Lott says further integration has been straightforward. “It’s not like we had to scramble to make it work. Our job is to make it work better and make it work more intuitively simple.”
Technology advances at speed
Lott has worked for Garmin for half his life. “When I compare the current Garmin ecosystem to when I started, it is worlds apart. We’ve gone from standalone systems for chartplotters and fishfinders, through to adding radar display.
This integration, with so many parts of the boat system coming together, was impossible to think of only ten or so years ago.”
He sees further integration as the path forward for the marine industry as a whole. “And within Garmin, automation and customisation within our integrated platform is going to be a big part of the future. Technology is moving so quickly now, especially with AI. In two or three years, it’s going to completely revolutionise a lot of industries.
“We’re pretty well integrated with the products that we have in-house and the acquisitions that we’ve made, but it’s going to accelerate over the next few years.
“In five to ten years, it will be a really cohesive system that is so well integrated. Things people do manually now will just happen the minute you’re on a boat. It’s going to be amazing to take the helm of a boat. It will be a stress-free experience (some parts of boating today can be really stressful) – we need to take that away.
“Having the broad portfolio that we’ve got now means that we have all the parts that are necessary to make customers’ experience really enjoyable.”
The post Inside Garmin’s acquisition strategy: building a tech-heavy future appeared first on Marine Industry News.
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