How Min built the fortune
Min Kao's wealth comes from his large stake in Garmin, the navigation company he started in 1989 with Gary Burrell, a fellow engineer. The pair had worked together at King Radio, an avionics maker in Kansas, and saw that the satellite positioning system being built by the US military would open a commercial market for handheld and dashboard receivers. They named the company by combining their first names, Gary and Min, and set up in the Kansas City area.
Garmin's early products served pilots and boaters, then hikers and drivers. Its car navigators sold in very large numbers in the 2000s, and the company survived the arrival of free smartphone mapping by shifting towards fitness watches, outdoor devices, aviation systems and marine electronics, where specialised hardware still commands a premium. That pivot proved durable and kept the company highly profitable.
Garmin went public on the Nasdaq in 2000, and Kao kept a large shareholding, which he has partly transferred to family trusts over time. It remains the main source of his fortune.
From the beginning Garmin kept control of design and manufacturing in-house, building its own factories in Taiwan rather than outsourcing production. Kao believed that vertical integration gave the company better control over quality, costs and product timing. That decision helped Garmin maintain healthy margins and respond quickly to new market opportunities, such as wearable fitness devices.
Companies and holdings
Kao was chief executive of Garmin until 2013, when Cliff Pemble succeeded him, and he continues as executive chairman. The company is incorporated in Switzerland, where it moved its legal domicile in 2010, while its main operations remain in Olathe, Kansas, and Taiwan, where it runs large manufacturing plants.
Garmin's business today is divided into fitness, outdoor, aviation, marine and automotive segments. It sells wearable devices for runners, cyclists and divers, cockpit systems for aircraft manufacturers and chart plotters and sonar for boats.
Garmin has become known for a broad product range and steady new launches, including smartwatches with long battery life, cycling computers, golf devices and satellite communicators that allow messaging and emergency calls in areas without mobile coverage. Its aviation business supplies integrated cockpit systems to many aircraft makers, and its marine unit is a leading supplier of chart plotters and sonar.
Early life and career
Kao was born in Taiwan in 1949 and studied electrical engineering at National Taiwan University. He moved to the United States for graduate school and earned a master's degree and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, completing his PhD in 1977.
He then worked on military and navigation systems for defence contractors, including work related to the satellite positioning programme, before joining King Radio. His technical familiarity with GPS was one of the founding strengths of Garmin.
At King Radio, Kao and Burrell worked on navigation equipment for aircraft, and the experience convinced them that GPS would become a mass market technology. Their first product, a portable navigator, was aimed at pilots and boaters, and its success gave the company the foundation for later expansion into automotive and consumer markets.
He has noted that his doctoral research and early defence work gave him an engineering grounding that later shaped Garmin's product development culture.
Philanthropy and public life
Kao has been a major donor to the University of Tennessee. In 2005 he and his wife Yu-Fan made a large gift to build the Min H. Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building on the Knoxville campus, which opened a few years later, and the department now carries his name. He has also supported education in Taiwan, including at his undergraduate university.
Kao is reserved in public and has given few interviews, generally discussing engineering and product development rather than his personal life.
Kao is often cited as an example of an immigrant engineer who built a major American technology company, and he has encouraged students to pursue engineering careers. His gifts to the University of Tennessee were intended in part to help the school attract strong faculty and students in electrical engineering and computer science.