Logitech Was Losing China. Hanneke Faber Changed What the Market Was For

Ask Hanneke Faber whether she gets nervous before an earnings call and she points you to the 10-meter platform. A back two-and-a-half somersault from that height, she told Semafor in September, is what frightening actually looks like. Faber is a former Dutch springboard diving champion.

That detail is also a useful way into the mindset behind what Faber did next. When Faber became Logitech’s chief executive on December 1, 2023, she took over a company coming down from the pandemic boom, in an industry where she had no hardware pedigree, and with a China business already under pressure. Her answer was not a bigger sales push. She changed what China was supposed to do for the company.

What is Logitech’s China-for-China strategy? It is a Shanghai-based team of engineers, designers, marketers and salespeople built to develop products and run marketing specifically for Chinese consumers, and judged on how quickly it learns. Logitech’s fiscal 2026 annual report lists a specific “China for China” initiative among its strategic priorities, for “innovating in this key, fast-paced market.” Faber’s larger claim is that the team works as a laboratory, and that what wins there can travel. This article looks at what she did, what the record shows, and what remains unproven.

A hardware company with a China problem

Faber came from Procter & Gamble, Ahold Delhaize and Unilever, where she ran the $14 billion Nutrition business. She describes herself as a brand person at heart, not an electronics veteran, and says the job has made her unexpectedly popular with teenage boys. At an event in Houston, she recalls, a fan asked her to sign two gaming mice. Her predecessor, Bracken Darrell, had resigned in June 2023, and director Guy Gecht held the job on an interim basis. Semafor reports that a Logitech co-founder had publicly voiced concern about the company’s future before she arrived.

“Hardware is hard,” she told Semafor, and mice, keyboards and webcams are exactly the kind of mid-priced products Chinese manufacturers have mastered. By her count there are about 500 makers of mice and keyboards in China and three in the rest of the world combined.

Logitech was not a newcomer there. It was already running a factory in Suzhou by 2005, and it remained a market leader in most categories even in China. But according to Semafor, the competition was so intense that it was losing share quickly when Faber started.

The pattern in her own account suggests the problem was tempo rather than presence. Chinese consumers, she says, react fast and their trends run ahead of the West. A company built around a calendar of simultaneous global launches was poorly set up to compete with that rhythm. That reading is analysis, not something Logitech has stated in those words, but it fits how Faber describes the fix.

The decision: give China a different job

The commitment became public in September 2024. In an interview with Forbes China, reported by the Swiss news agency SDA, Faber said Logitech would put more capital and people into the country and work more closely with Baidu, Tencent and JD.

At the Morgan Stanley technology conference on March 4, 2026, Faber described the structure. Logitech moved resources into Shanghai and assembled a multifunctional team of engineers, designers, marketers and salespeople. It had two missions. The first was product innovation for Chinese consumers, and she named the Alto Keys and the G316 among the results. The second was to modernize sales and marketing.

The marketing half may matter as much as the products. Faber told Semafor that Logitech now uses AI agents to judge which of its thousands of pieces of content perform best on social commerce platforms such as Douyin and PDD, then moves budget accordingly.

How the China lab is meant to work

Logitech traditionally launches 30 to 40 new products a year, releasing them together. Faber says it now adds another eight to ten designed only for China, which Semafor notes has the largest gaming market in the world. Within two or three months, the company can see which of them take off.

The logic is simple. If a product hits in China, she says, it will probably work elsewhere too. Semafor reports that products such as the G316 X gaming keyboard came directly out of that testing ground. Logitech’s January 2026 shareholder letter points the same way, crediting strong demand for the China-for-China G316 keyboard with market-share gains in China.

There is evidence of the loop running the other way as well. In the call that followed the fiscal 2026 results, Faber said Logitech had just held a digital marketing summit for roughly 120 of its top marketers in Shanghai so they could take the China lessons back to the rest of the world.

Why use China as a testing ground at all? Because speed of feedback is the scarce resource. Faber likens the market to a gym that keeps a company fit: if you can win there, she argues, you can win anywhere. The cost is a bet that Chinese tastes predict Western ones, and that may hold for some categories and not for others.

What the numbers show

Start with the filings. Revenue from customers in China was 10% of Logitech’s sales in fiscal 2024, 10% in fiscal 2025 and 12% in fiscal 2026, according to the annual report. Total sales over the same period went from about $4.30 billion to $4.55 billion to $4.84 billion.

Logitech reports China only as a share of sales, not as a separate dollar figure, so the size of the gain cannot be pinned down more precisely than that.

The timeline of share gains is consistent with the strategy working. Faber said on the July 2025 call that the China team had returned to growing share in the Chinese gaming market that May. By the November 2025 call she was describing double-digit gaming sales growth in China, which she called Logitech’s biggest gaming market. In the quarter that ended in June 2025, Asia Pacific sales grew 15%, led by double-digit growth in China. Semafor reports that China has been Logitech’s fastest-growing market for the past several quarters.

Company-wide, fiscal 2026 sales rose 6% in dollars and 4% in constant currency. Non-GAAP operating income reached $911 million, up 18%, and the 18.8% operating margin was the highest Logitech has recorded outside the pandemic peaks. In its most recent quarter, ended June 2026, it reported its tenth straight quarter of growth.

Two cautions belong beside those figures. First, the results have many fathers: gaming, pointing devices, video collaboration, pricing, currency and cost cuts all contributed, and no filing isolates the effect of the Shanghai team. Second, momentum has cooled. In the June 2026 quarter, Asia Pacific grew 5%, with China ahead of the region but well below the pace of a year earlier. This is a strong business and a real improvement. It is not a miracle turnaround.

The twist: leaning into China while leaving it

While Faber was making China more central as a market, Logitech was making it less central as a source of goods for the United States.

When U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made goods rose, Logitech shifted production lines to contract manufacturers in Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Mexico. In July 2025, Faber told Reuters the company was well on track to cut the share of U.S.-bound products made in China from 40% to 10% by year-end. The January 2026 shareholder letter said the share had fallen from roughly 40% in April to under 10%. Logitech calls the approach “China plus five.”

That sounds like a contradiction. It is closer to two separate risk decisions. Customer concentration and manufacturing concentration are different exposures, and a company can deepen one while reducing the other. Logitech is trying to learn more from Chinese consumers while making sure one country does not determine where its American shipments come from.

It also has limits. The annual filing says the Suzhou facility handles about 35% of Logitech’s total production by value, and about 2,300 of the company’s roughly 7,300 people work there. That is a different measure from the share of U.S.-bound goods, and the two should not be confused. Logitech has not left China. It has narrowed what the U.S. market depends on China for.

What could still go wrong

Local competition does not go away because Logitech has a Shanghai team. The annual report names Shenzhen Rapoo and Xiaomi among the local competitors that pressure prices in keyboards and mice, and Faber’s own count of 500 manufacturers is a reminder that the market punishes slow products. Faber also told analysts in May that Logitech is seeing an influx of Chinese brands in Europe and has spent more on promotion there to defend its share.

What remains unproven is whether China-first products can become a repeatable source of global hits. The public evidence for China-born ideas going global rests largely on Faber’s account and a small number of named products. Logitech has not published how many China-first products have been exported or what they earned.

Geopolitics cuts both ways. The annual report warns that continuing changes in China-U.S. relations are expected to bring policy changes that could prevent or limit Logitech from building or selling products in China. A company that sells to Chinese consumers and still makes roughly a third of its output by value in Suzhou has exposure that diversifying U.S. shipments does not remove.

And the lab depends on parts that arrive on time.

AI and the chip squeeze: the next test

Faber sees China as an early indicator of where hardware is heading. On four visits there this year she noticed the spread of voice-activated AI wearables, and she told Semafor that China is, in this respect, the future. Logitech now pitches its devices as the way people see, hear and interact with AI, and she argues voice has become a more important way to work with software. If that is right, a fast-moving China team gets more valuable, not less.

Then came the supply problem. In late June 2026, a serious incident at a semiconductor supplier’s manufacturing facility forced it to close. In its July 28 results, Logitech estimated a headwind of about $20 million to second-quarter sales and up to $200 million in the third quarter, with the effect largely resolved by the fourth quarter. The company did not name the supplier. On the call, management said the facility remained closed with no firm reopening date, that the incident was at a component supplier and not at one of its manufacturing partners, and that existing inventory would soften the near-term hit.

This is separate from a second problem: Logitech’s annual report says the build-out of AI and data centers has raised demand and prices for memory chips, and led some suppliers to shift capacity away from components it uses. Faber told Bloomberg that Logitech has raised prices only in video conferencing, where memory costs jumped. Keeping the two problems apart matters, because one is an accident at a single supplier and the other is a structural squeeze.

In a Wall Street Journal interview published September 30, Faber described spending the summer visiting suppliers in Asia and Switzerland to secure scarce components, and said she did not expect clear relief for 12 to 18 months. The episode exposes a harder limit to the laboratory model: learning quickly is useful only if Logitech can secure the components to turn those lessons into products.

What other executives can take from it

Four things stand out, and none of them amounts to simply going where the growth is.

Ask what a hard market can teach, not only what it can buy. Faber did not treat China as a territory to defend. She gave it a team with authority to build and sell, then treated the results as information.

Keep the risk of selling to a country apart from the risk of making things in it. Logitech increased one exposure and cut the other, which leaves it more flexible than any single decision about being in China or out of it.

Build a feedback loop you can read in weeks. Eight to ten China-only products and a two-to-three-month read is a testable system.

Know what failure would look like. If the strategy is working, you should be able to say what you would expect to see if it were not. For Logitech, that would be flat China share, imported ideas that fail abroad, or a team that slows down as it scales.

Verdict: working, not finished

The evidence supports a measured conclusion. Logitech’s China share of sales has risen, its China gaming share has been growing again since May 2025 by the company’s account, its margins are strong and its growth streak continues. It also cut China’s role in U.S.-bound manufacturing sharply and fast.

What the record does not show is how much of that is the Shanghai team, how well China-first products sell elsewhere, or how far the model can run while a single chip supplier can take up to $200 million out of a quarter. The experiment is still running. Whether Logitech can keep learning faster than its rivals, while reducing the vulnerabilities that come with being a global hardware company, is what the next few quarters will decide.