Top 100 CEO Interviews
Issue No. 25 - October/November 2005
Top 100 Legend no Flash in the pan
Legend Corporation is an electronics engineering and manufacturing company that designs, manufactures and distributes memory modules and related computer components, from its Adelaide headquarters, through an international network.
The firm has manufacturing facilities in Australia and Singapore, with 12 sales offices throughout its main theatres of operations including Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, greater China, central Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
Parts customers include Acer, Brother, DELL, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Konica, Kyocera, Lexmark, NEC and Xerox.
Legend reported a net operating profit $4.7 million for the 2004-05 financial year, an 80 per cent increase on the previous year.
Branded products include memory modules and Flash digital media, while Legend distributes AMD processors, Hitachi global storage technologies hard disk drives and mainboards by Foxconn and MSI.
Sales in the mature markets of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa grew from $92.6 million in 2004 to $116.7 million in 2005.
CEO Bradley Dowe credits the firm’s complimentary sales model as a prime reason for the financial growth.
Bradley says this year was still flush with the working capital raised in the March 2004 IPO — a welcome injection after 15 years of private company development.
This year has seen a 42% revenue increase to endorse the Legend business model, which Bradley says is quite remarkably stable in an industry as volatile as IT.
“It’s a sales and distribution model, but we make about 70% of what we sell,” he says.
Here, Legend’s origins as a component supplier pay off. The company can distribute its own branded equipment along the same, well-developed lines of communication.
About half of Legend’s staff are salespeople, and are also responsible for liaison with other manufacturers who use Legend components, and with retailers.
“The advantage is that we man...
