Fountain Valley’s D-Link Systems Inc., a maker of networking gear for consumers, small businesses and schools, is seeing restructuring earlier this year pay off.
The company, the U.S. arm of Taiwan’s D-Link Corp., doesn’t disclose revenue. But growing sales at its parent company suggest the Fountain Valley operation is seeing a sustained rebound after what seemed to be a 2008 slowdown.
Last month, D-Link saw companywide sales of $81 million, down 4.5% from a year earlier but up more than 30% from January’s $62 million in monthly sales.
The company’s U.S. headquarters in Fountain Valley, which has some 300 workers here, is estimated at about a quarter of the company’s yearly sales, or about $225 million, down from an estimated $350 million two years ago.
The turnaround comes after a shakeup in executives, new marketing initiatives and a general improvement in the economy from the lows of the recession.
“Customers are now starting to purchase more products and we are starting to see our deal sizes get larger,” said Nick Tidd, vice president of marketing for North America and vice president of sales for the Pan America operations.
Tidd, a veteran of Marlborough, Mass.-based 3Com Corp., has been cutting his teeth as the top local guy at D-Link during the past six months. He recently relocated from Toronto to Huntington Beach.
In May, the company reworked its executive lineup with the departure of Steven Joe, former U.S. president and chief executive who spent more than 20 years at the company.
Keith Karlsen, former executive vice president, also left during the reorganization when D-Link consolidated operations in North America and South America.
As part of the restructuring, D-Link named Carlos Casassus Fontecilla, a 10-year company veteran who formerly served as head of Latin America, as president of Pan America (which includes all three regions). Fontecilla is based in Santiago, Chile.
The company has been hiring executives at a rapid clip, mostly in sales and marketing.
D-Link hired Betsy Roddy as director of field marketing. Roddy formerly was an executive at Viewsonic Corp., a privately held maker of monitors, TVs and other products in Walnut.
It also hired Terry West as field marketing program manager for resellers of D-Link products.
D-Link is looking to hire an associate vice president of field system engineering, a chief information officer and a director of business solutions marketing.
The company has added 17 marketing workers in all, with about a dozen of them here, as part of a big effort to boost its brand name.
“I’m still recruiting,” Tidd said. “We are always looking for marketing folks to help us develop a more robust brand.”
D-Link is a well-known name among consumers who link together multiple computers, printers and other devices. It competes with 3Com, Linksys, an Irvine-based unit of Cisco Systems Inc., Netgear Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., along with smaller players.
“The consumer business is what we are most known for, but we are branching into enterprises,” Tidd said. “We are working to transition that brand significance from one form to the other.”
D-Link is gaining business during the downturn, according to Tidd, with products that sell for less than those of rivals.
“The recession has been an interesting exercise as executives have been forced to re-evaluate their technology budgets,” Tidd said. “That really plays into our expertise.”
The branding push includes a new Web site that seeks to appeal to corporate customers as well as those in new markets, such as government and education.
“That has been centered on our marketing and sales initiative and helping us take advantage of opportunities around education, healthcare and new technologies,” Tidd said.
D-Link has set its sights on growing a small part of its business—selling networking gear to cable TV and Internet service providers.
The company is selling routers, mobile access cards and devices that stream television over the Internet, Tidd said.
“It’s a small percentage of our sales today, but one that we see growing,” he said.
