The Garmin company optimizes the health of its customers with sports watches and blood pressure monitors. The company is based in Garching, which is where we visited.
Garching – The two DIN A4 sheets of paper are freshly printed out on the table, with colorful graphics and all sorts of data about your own health. Heart rate, weight curve, stress level, calorie consumption, body energy reserves. And now, this is new, the blood pressure. Everything was fine, except for a small outlier in the lactate threshold. You can tell the man is in great shape. “I do a lot of sport,” says Kai Tutschke, explaining his resting heart rate of 44 beats per minute. As managing director of Garmin Deutschland GmbH in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), the 51-year-old exemplifies what the company, which specializes in fitness, outdoor sports and adventure, stands for: “We accompany people in their active lives – for better health, Well-being and the best attitude towards life.”
In the business campus at Parkring 35 in Garching, where Garmin Deutschland GmbH has been coordinating its business areas for the German-speaking region in almost 4,000 square meters of modern office space since 2011, Kai Tutschke is demonstrating the latest product for himself: the intelligent blood pressure monitor “Index BPM” ( 180 euros). Quickly put on the comfortable cuff (suitable for an arm circumference of 22 to 42 centimeters), select one of up to 16 possible users at the push of a button and start the measurement. The handy device, certified as a medical device, now determines systolic and diastolic blood pressure as well as the pulse. The values can be read directly after the measurement via an integrated OLED display.
But that's not all. The Index BPM particularly shows its strengths when it is connected to the “Garmin Connect” app via WiFi. It can display the history and trends of measurements as well as other health statistics or set reminders for blood pressure measurement. Not only can weekly, monthly or annual reports be created, but they can also be exported as a PDF file. “In this way, when I was recently sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, I sent my health data in advance via email,” reports Kai Tutschke.
After the GPS sports watches (since 2003) and a body scale, now a blood pressure monitor: “It completes our ecosystem,” says the Garmin managing director. And it is part of the transformation of a company whose history began in 1989 with handheld GPS devices (see box). Car sat navs were later added, which accounted for 80 percent of sales in 2008 and hardly play a role today - the focus is now on high-tech sports watches with GPS functions, differentiated in detail for different user groups, from triathlon to golf or diving to high alpine expeditions. “Today we are an active tech company,” said Kai Tutschke. This development is “an exciting journey; Garmin is a different company today than it was ten and five years ago.”
Around 270 employees boost business from Garching, and around 20,000 people are employed at various production locations worldwide. 2023 was the best year in the company's history: sales were $5.23 billion and operating profit was 21 percent. Successes that Garmin does not want to rest on, they are “just momentum,” emphasizes Kai Tutschke, who warns against complacency: “It would be a fallacy to believe that we cannot fail because of our size.”
In the fitness and sports watch segment, Garmin is something like FC Bayern in football and also advertises with their former national player Bastian Schweinsteiger. The group sometimes buys other companies, such as fitness bike simulations for the home or entertainment systems for yachts, “but never anything foreign,” says the Garmin boss: “We stay true to our DNA.”
One of the projects for the future: provide more information on health issues. According to studies, Kai Tutschke calculates, around a third of the population in Germany suffer from high blood pressure, and half do no exercise at all or rarely do it. The aim is to inspire people who don't want to exercise with tailor-made concepts, from fitness watches to sophisticated training plans via app. “Knowledge is the first step to optimizing health, because without knowledge there is no awareness - we create this,” the manager outlines his vision.