MEMSIC Chairman Huang Haiyan Leads Team to Visit Garmin, Fifteen Years of Cooperation Opens a New Chapter

Recently, Huang Haiyan, Chairwoman of MEMSIC, led a team to successively visit Garmin's headquarters in Kansas, USA, and held exchange discussions with the North American Auto Professionals Association and the Detroit Chinese Engineers Association, engaging in in-depth exchanges with customers and technical experts on deepening cooperation in smart sensing products such as geomagnetic sensors and IMUs, as well as new opportunities in the North American market.

As a globally renowned brand deeply engaged in fields such as fitness, outdoor, aviation, marine and automotive electronics, Garmin has a rich product line and is known for its professionalism and reliability, and is an important partner of MEMSIC in North America. At present, a number of MEMSIC sensor products have been applied to multiple Garmin product lines, and the two sides have been working together for fifteen years.

Old Friends Are Best

Celebrating Fifteen Years of Partnership

Huang Haiyan and her delegation first entered Garmin's Kansas headquarters campus. "There is a Chinese proverb: clothes are best when new, friends are best when old — things are better the newer they are, friends are better the older they are. We have worked with Garmin for many years and have truly become family," she said, then candidly stated, "The main purpose of my visit this time is to seek greater room for cooperation. Garmin makes complete products for end users, while MEMSIC mainly provides one or several sensor chips within them, but MEMSIC will focus on making sensors better, and with better products and services, make Garmin's products better too."

This focus and commitment stem from the strength and confidence MEMSIC has accumulated over many years. On the Android platform, MEMSIC's geomagnetic sensors hold more than 40% of the global share, and its accelerometers hold about 30%; in European and American markets, Garmin, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and others are all its long-term customers. Huang Haiyan said: "Garmin's slogan includes innovation, and MEMSIC also has the philosophy of 'sensing all things, boundless future' and never stops innovating — we cooperate with each other and progress together."

Deepening Alignment on Technical Needs

Working Together to Open a New Journey in Wearable Sensing

At the exchange meeting between the two sides, Garmin engineers, combining global smart wearable industry development trends, shared product iteration ideas and put forward many industry viewpoints and specific technical requirements regarding sensing performance, power consumption, reliability and other directions for next-generation devices. Huang Haiyan responded: "MEMSIC will, according to Garmin's needs for future sensors, design and produce sensors that can meet the requirements of Garmin's future products, and continue to travel far together with Garmin."

Garmin's engineers also stated: "We are willing to actively evaluate and test new products successively launched by MEMSIC, such as IMUs and other inertial sensing devices, so that MEMSIC's new products better fit the needs of market development."

She said: "In the AI era, all devices need to be intelligent and will be redefined, and sensing is becoming increasingly important; in the past, fabs were a burden for semiconductor companies, but now they are becoming core competitiveness. However, building and maintaining a FAB requires greater market space to support it. MEMSIC's cooperation with industry leaders like Garmin makes MEMSIC more capable of rapid development." She continued to explain that MEMSIC will complete IMU back-end construction this year and order more equipment for its Shaoxing FAB factory to produce more brand-new products, forming an independent closed loop and truly realizing the progression from fabless to fab-lite and then to IDM.

Huang Haiyan made an analogy: "For a big company like Garmin, the support MEMSIC can give today may be only the strength of one finger, but we will go all out to let it grow into the strength of a whole hand." She said that it is precisely based on mutual recognition at the enterprise and product levels that the two sides have been able to walk side by side for fifteen years. "When we need it, we hope to get our partner's support; when our partner needs it, we will also do our utmost to support them."

After the meeting, the two sides had a working lunch together and toured the Garmin campus together in a very harmonious atmosphere.

Into Detroit

Deepening Exploration of New Opportunities in Automotive Industry Cooperation

Subsequently, Huang Haiyan and her delegation held discussions with the Detroit Chinese Engineers Association (DCEA). The association brings together technical and management talent in fields such as automobiles, batteries and sensing. The two sides held in-depth exchanges on topics such as electric drive systems and power battery modeling and algorithms, and clarified the follow-up direction: maintain association interaction, identify potential cooperation opportunities with automotive Tier1/Tier2 companies, plan technical exchange activities between China and the United States, and help MEMSIC expand sales channels in North America.

Figure 2 Group photo of this visit's exchanges

From the face-to-face in-depth talks at the Garmin campus in Kansas to the linking of industry resources in Detroit, this US trip was both a deepening of a fifteen-year partnership and another proactive move by MEMSIC to cultivate the North American market. Relying on a global system covering R&D, manufacturing, sales and technical support, MEMSIC will continue to serve global customers with high-precision, low-power, miniaturized intelligent sensing products and increasingly improved manufacturing capabilities, accelerating the realization of "sensing all things, boundless future."